Re: Plugin Package Paths

[Peter Polidoro]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

> These programs should be patched to honor e.g. 
> FREECAD_PLUGINS_PATH or
> similar.  Then a 'native-search-path' specification can be 
> attached to
> the freecad packaged, and finding freecad plugins will happen in 
> any
> profile.
>
> The FREECAD_PLUGINS_PATH should be written with the intent of
> upstreaming it (sharing it for inclusion with upstream), as that 
> should
> be valuable to other distributions/scenarios as well.

Thanks. I have reached out to both the kicad and freecad 
communities about adding support for environment variable options 
in the search paths, but so far people from both communities seem 
skeptical.

Do you know of any examples of other projects doing this properly 
in Python and C++ that I can show to these communities?

Both programs search for the executable path, then base other 
system search paths relative to this root path. In general, do you 
think it is better to use an environment variable to set the root 
to the profile directory or to be more narrow and just specify the 
plugin path or paths if the program uses more than one?

I am guessing it may take a while, if ever, to get such changes 
included in the upstream projects. In the mean time, is it 
considered bad practice to attempt to just patch the source code 
in the Guix package?