Re: gEDA-user: (x)gsch2pcb question (was: PCB can't find new footprints)

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 15:54 +0200, Richard Rasker wrote:

> The question is simple: The directory /home/richard/electron/local_fps
> contains my local footprints. Now I'd like to tell gsch2pcb (and
> xgsch2pcb -- very nice tool, BTW!) about this location, regardless of
> the project. Lots of these components (and hence footprints) are used in
> several projects, therefore I wish to have these globally available.

No direct way that I know of.

> So far, the -d command line option of gsch2pcb works, but that's no use
> with xgsch2pcb. Also, it's a bit bothersome to have to enter this
> library path every single time.
>
> So I tried adding the following line to the project file
> (driver3.gsch2pcb):
> 
> elements-dir "/home/richard/electron/local_fps"
> 
> Alas, xgsch2pcb doesn't recognize this as a valid option, and I can't
> find any help or options listing for this tool.

That was a mis-feature of older xgsch2pcb - it would die if it
encountered an option it didn't recognise. Grab the latest in the git
repository with:

git clone git://git.gpleda.org/xgsch2pcb.git

Then enter the directory, run "./autogen.sh"

"./configure" with any options you want - depending on where you want it
installed, if you have gEDA in $HOME/geda, e.g.:

"./configure --prefix=/home/XXXXX/geda"

"make"
"make install"

If you had gEDA installed from the distro, that will be in /usr/bin. In
that case, you might want to go with the default ./configure which will
locate xgsch2pcb in /usr/local/bin. (sudo make install). That shuold
ensure the tool is picked up without adding to your search paths for the
shell / desktop.

> Nevertheless, I tried
> copying this file to several locations (my home directory, the project
> directory, ~/.gEDA/); I tried adding the line to system-garfrc, I tried
> adding a library-newlib line to ~/.pcb/preferences, and I tried a
> source-library line in gafrc instead. During these attempts, I perused
> the mailing list archives and several gEDA tutorials, but all to no
> avail -- so now I don't know what else to try but to return to this
> mailing list ...

gsch2pcb (underlying xgsch2pcb) doesn't have any place to set global
defaults. 

This said, reading the source, it looks like it will respond to an
environment variable:

PCBLIBPATH=/path/to/a:/path/to/b

> It must of course be possible to use xgsch2pcb with local footprint
> libraries -- so what am I doing wrong? How can I tell gsch2pcb and
> xgsch2pcb once and for all that I want to use the footprints
> in /home/richard/electron/local_fps?

Not currently possible, but something which we can look into if / when
we rework gsch2pcb.

I just use the "packages" directory in my project for footprints.
gsch2pcb looks there by default.

Best wishes,

Peter C.




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