BOM dialog should be pre-populated with plugins

[Chris Pavlina]

Can we make the BOM dialog pre-populate itself with the default plugins, either at runtime or build time? I think having to search for plugins by default (and not necessarily knowing where to find them) is going to trip up beginners big time.

[Chris Pavlina (pavlina-chris)]

Not sure why Launchpad doubled this one...

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

You're welcome to give it a try. It would probably make life easier for
users if we could pre-populate the default plugins but my guess is that
you will have to fight the platform specific path issues that are
constant source of grief.

On 6/13/2015 2:14 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Can we make the BOM dialog pre-populate itself with the default plugins,
> either at runtime or build time? I think having to search for plugins by
> default (and not necessarily knowing where to find them) is going to
> trip up beginners big time.
>
> ** Affects: kicad
> Importance: Wishlist
> Status: New
>
>
> ** Tags: eeschema
>

[Chris Pavlina (pavlina-chris)]

Yeah, that's always been a problem. :(

Perhaps we should make an attempt to get things universally compatible with the paths returned by wxStandardPaths?

http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_standard_paths.html

It looks to me like the plugins should be at (GetPluginsDir() + "/plugins") right now, but I can't immediately verify that on all platforms.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

On 6/13/2015 5:53 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Yeah, that's always been a problem. :(
>
> Perhaps we should make an attempt to get things universally compatible
> with the paths returned by wxStandardPaths?
>
> http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_standard_paths.html

We've tried wxStandardPaths but it doesn't seem to work correctly on osx
bundles. Maybe the plugin path(s) wont be as problematic as the other
paths but I wouldn't count on it. You can run standard paths from the
Python console so maybe you can get one of the OSX devs to run the
Pcbnew python console and confirm the results of the various
wxStandardPath functions.

>
> It looks to me like the plugins should be at (GetPluginsDir() +
> "/plugins") right now, but I can't immediately verify that on all
> platforms.
>
> ** Changed in: kicad
> Status: Invalid => New
>

[Thomas Pointhuber (pointhi)]

Bump: would be interesting to get this into KiCad 5 to help new users.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

I'm going to set this to 5.1 since it's going to take some testing to ensure that it works correctly given the platform dependent path issues I described in #4. I would rather not rush it just to get it into the first version 5 point release (5.0.1).

[Sujith (sujitth)]

Hope bom2csv will make it as a default plugin, if so, please change the command as - xsltproc -o "%O_BOM.csv" "C:\Program Files\KiCad\bin\scripting\plugins\bom2csv.xsl" "%I"

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 2ee2d9014a3a9478880a7e8cd4a8790038deebde
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=2ee2d9014a3a9478880a7e8cd4a8790038deebde