I guess the fact that environment variables are tricky to set for
graphical applications for the Mac may be a blessing here :)
Should we try to package a macOS version that installs to
/Applications/KiCad5 and /Library/Application Support/kicad?
Adam
On Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 2:41 AM Eeli Kaikkonen <eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
There are some people in the user forum who have spent time with
these v4->v5 problems, including me and Rene. The consensus about
the environment variables seems to be what Rene already said, that
they should not (without explicit user intervention) be set for
the system, but from KiCad itself. Nick confirmed that the current
v5 installer won't set them by default. They are still a problem
if they have been set by v4 installer.
su 15. heinäk. 2018 klo 5.04 Strontium (strntydog@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:strntydog@xxxxxxxxx>) kirjoitti:
I honestly think each major revision of KiCad should be
considered a NEW
program, installs to a new place has its configuration and
libraries all
in a new location. Only Incremental updates 5.0 -> 5.1 should be
considered upgrades.
I agree. It's probable that many users will want to continue with
v4 for old projects but v5 for new, and in the future the same
thing will be true for v5 vs. v6, because they break the
file/project compatibility. But where the compatibility is kept
it's more likely to be considered as just an upgrade.
Kicad configuration isn't complex or onerous so if a user
wants to bring
a Kicad4 config into Kicad5 or 6 or whatever, then they do that
themselves, otherwise after install Kicad5 is a fresh blank
sheet with
no relationship to anything that happened on the users
computer in
Kicad4. I am not familiar with the issues on Windows, but I
would have
thought now this is mostly a packaging issue only??
I tried modifying the Windows installer, I only needed to replace
some of "KiCad" strings with "KiCad5" and it can install v5
alongside v4 independently. The only problem is the configuration
and the environment variables set by v4. They can be handled with
a startup script. See
https://forum.kicad.info/t/does-v5-have-to-overwrite-on-install/11282
for some details.
I also agree if it can't work this way now on Windows, then
its all a
bit late for V5, but maybe V6 can consider itself a new
program distinct
from V5. This would also help with testing, because users
could use V5
for daily work, but also easily install a V6 daily side by side.
All this could be done with the Windows installer, provided that a
startup script would be offered.
To make this all, at least the startup script, as simple as
possible I would suggest one (or three) small changes to KiCad
(for 5.1, or even 5.0.1?). Add command line options
--config=/path/to/config and --ignore-env-vars. The former is
obvious and would override KICAD_CONFIG_HOME system environment
variable. The latter would make KiCad ignore all system
environment variables and use the current internal logic and the
path settings UI instead. That way the old variables could be left
for v4 and the newer versions would be completely independent if
the command line switches were used. The command line switch for
the config path would be mostly for convenience. In Windows
starting a program with custom environment variables is tedious
and error prone to write (see the above mentioned thread). Command
line switches are much easier.
It could also be possible to make --ignore-env-vars=true by
default. Sharing the environment variables would be a special case
if the user wants that.
The general problem with using system environment variables is
that they are good for situations when there's only one version of
a program on the system, and/or several processes share the same
variable values. Neither of them is true for parallel
installations of KiCad.
Eeli Kaikkonen
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