kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Bernhard Stegmaier <stegmaier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On 8. Nov 2019, at 13:24, Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 11:08 PM Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> Merging them in is blocked on the "eliminate symlinked bundles" task.
> 
> Is this about the symlinked eeschema.app etc in the main kicad folder?
> Are the plans to copy instead of symlink? Or could we instead move
> them, and make kicad.app able to find those apps, so something like
> "APP_BUNDLE_DIR/../eeschema.app”?

The symlink ist just there to have some simple access for the standalone apps.

IMHO you cannot just copy or move the standalone apps for this reason:
To best of my knowledge every macOS application is considered to be self contained, you can move it to any place you want and start it.
The standalone apps (eeschema, pcbnew, etc.) share a lot of libraries… KiCad internal stuff (the kiway libs) and other libraries like wxWidgets.
For the libraries linked you need to do this with a given (fixed) path during building.

If now users move e.g. eeschema.app around because it looks like it is a usual macOS application, it will never find it’s libraries from inside kicad.app (the search paths in the binaries won’t change if you move the application around).
Of course, you could require that the copied eeschema app always has to be in some certain relative place to kicad.app.
But, that would be some special KiCad limitation that doesn’t hold for other macOS applications and probably causes even more confusion.

Of course, you could just duplicate all libs for each standalone application, but it was a decision way back not to do it.

Best way (also has been discussed) would be if this standalone apps wouldn’t be needed at all, but you could just open single schematic/pcb files independent from a project from project manager (kicad.app) directly.


Regards,
Bernhard