Hi all! After reading all the other messages, here are my two cents:
The KiCAD installer should just offer to do a full git clone of kicad-footprints and kicad-libray (which will be split into 3D, templates, etc. for the 5.0 release as I understand). A full clone takes 3.8 GB. A shallow clone takes 3.6 GB. The .git-direcotry size is 650 MB vs 486 MB. So it's not worth the hassle IMHO as shallow clones don't allow to generate pull-requests without unshallowing them first. BTW: 2 GB of that checkout is spent on the packages3d subdirectory. We could just support loading of .wrl.gz/.step.gz to save space. In 2017, a few gig of harddisk space, and a < 1 gig download should be OK for everyone. All the other PCB tools, FPGA toolchains, Netflix, etc. are far bigger. The other suggestions were quite surprising to me -- Github API, downloading individual subdirectories as .zip, abusing subversion (gasp), gitslave (last updated 2012), etc. would be a big hurdle and WTF for new KiCAD users. So why not use git as it was supposed to be used? best regards, thomas On 22.09.2017 03:21, Oliver Walters wrote: > Hi all, > > Ok, now that the website integration with the libraries is (pretty much) done, > and the licensing issue seems to be sorted, there is one final puzzle piece to > solve before I'm happy with the state of the libraries for a v5 release. > > *Goal: *Merge all footprint library repositories into a single repo to solve > the > ongoing dramas of maintaining 100+ repos. > > *Problem*: The *only* thing standing in the way of just doing this is that > some > users like the GitHub plugin and previous instruction is that this > functionality > cannot be removed. > > The GitHub plugin functions by downloading a .zip file of a .pretty repo. If > we > merge all footprint libs into a single repo with multiple subdirectories, this > will not work anymore (as GitHub dosen't allow you to download a .zip of a > single subdirectory). > > Merging the repos is the *right thing to do*. But how to proceed? > > *Options:* > * > * > /a) Drop github plugin feature, replace with library-download tool/ > > I don't think it is a good idea to live-load library data from GitHub (a lot > of > other users agree too). It's slow, and a waste of bandwidth to re-download the > libs all the time. > > We drop support for loading libraries direct from GitHub. However, we add a > tool > for downloading libraries from GitHub and storing to disk. Users can update as > they like. This can be integrated in KiCad and new users can run this tool > when > they first install KICad. This means that no libs need to distributed with the > installer and users can update to latest libs whenever they want. > > /b) Improve github plugin to allow subdirectory traversal/ > > This is difficult and will only result in the plugin being slower. There are > two > ways I can see to do this: > > i. Use Git API - tools exist that use this functionality > - https://github.com/KinoLien/gitzip > ii. Use subversion - GitHub actually provides subversion API > - https://www.seanw.org/blog/download-git-repo-subdirectory/ > > > *Subversion* > > In either case, I think that using the subversion tool to partially download > the > libraries would be a good approach (I assume quicker than using wget and the > GitHub API). > > 1. Does anyone have any experience using the C API for SVN? > 2. The Python bindings are pretty good - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/svn - > and > much easier to use. However, can we make the library download tools dependent > on > enabling the python plugin? > 3. Is there a way to checkout a subversion remote to memory (to replicate the > functionality of the current GitHub plugin)? If not, I'm not sure how to > approach option b) above. > > > Feedback appreciated. I think that it is very important especially for new > users > that this is improved. The GitHub plugin is constantly causing headaches! > > Cheers, > Oliver > > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
