Plugin and Content Manager - how to handle plugins with dependencies?

[craftyjon]

@marekr

The question is, where will pip be told to installed packages? AppData, Documents/kicad//scripting? PRogramData (all users), etc, etc

I would think somewhere inside AppData is most appropriate? Does ProgramData require elevation?

[marekr]

ProgramData is actually the true path for C:\Users\Public\AppData which is an alias/symlink

[marekr]

Hmmm, I would want to add “Launch pip” to the kicad launcher…but it would most likely be windows specific…which I’m not sure offends the others ~~~

[craftyjon]

@marekr

well I already know a plethora of solutions that’ll fix this without patching pip.

What I like right now. Create a “Launch kicad pip console” in the windows start menu and maybe elsewhere. This console will just be a bat file that sets all the environment variables to make pip use all the correct kicad directories, I can even shove a pip.ini down it’s throat by force at that point.

I must have misunderstood our earlier conversation, I thought you were saying that even with all the ini file and env var stuff, pip needed source patching to work properly

[craftyjon]

@marekr

I would want to add “Launch pip” to the kicad launcher…but it would most likely be windows specific…which I’m not sure offends the others

I think this kind of technique is needed on macOS as well

[marekr]

@craftyjon

@marekr

well I already know a plethora of solutions that’ll fix this without patching pip.

What I like right now. Create a “Launch kicad pip console” in the windows start menu and maybe elsewhere. This console will just be a bat file that sets all the environment variables to make pip use all the correct kicad directories, I can even shove a pip.ini down it’s throat by force at that point.

I must have misunderstood our earlier conversation, I thought you were saying that even with all the ini file and env var stuff, pip needed source patching to work properly

Ah, it might work, the problem is we can’t set a global environment variable in windows since it’s the generic python ones. And pip.ini is loaded based on working directory invocation of the shell. But it’s still buggy so it needs testing. I had cases where it was ignoring me anyway, and in other cases it was not.

[yaqwsx]

Hi, one of the non-functional plugins on windows is KiKit. You can trigger the behavior by running .\python.exe -m pip install git+https://github.com/yaqwsx/KiKit@v6support. It will complain about not being able to compile the regex library.

EDIT: The library is a dependency of solidpython; however, in unreleased version the dependency is removed and you can install KiKit.

[eelik]

KiCad doesn’t support binary dependencies in plugins. This is a known limitation, relevant on Windows.

Edit: as you can see in the discussion above. But because it was the topic, I’m not sure why you responded to me saying that.

[yaqwsx]

I was responding to your question “Do you have some example plugin which tries to use a pip package which doesn’t work (one of those nonworking 30% cases)?” - yes I have. It is KiKit. At least it was before we got rid of the problematic dependency.