Re: [PATCH] gnu: add kicad

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 08:40:46AM +0100, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> this patch adds kicad, an electronics design automation tool, to "engineering.scm".

Cool, I would really like to offer KiCad in Guix. This fell through the
cracks but I'd like to resurrect it!

Danny, are you still interested in working on it? Here are some
comments...

> +(define-public kicad

> +              (uri (string-append
> +                   "https://launchpad.net/kicad/4.0/kicad-"
> +                   version
> +                   "/+download/kicad-"
> +                   version
> +                   ".tar.xz"))

It seems they changed the URL format. This works for me now:
https://launchpad.net/kicad/4.0/4.0.2/+download/kicad-4.0.2.tar.xz

Also, the quoted URL string should start on the same line as
string-append.

> +   (arguments
> +    '(#:tests? #f ; TODO re-enable

Do you remember the state of the tests? Was it just a few that failed?

> +      #:configure-flags

I noticed on the KiCad download page [0] some instructions to set the
version string, and other useful build-time configurations. Do you think
it would be appropriate to apply them?

------
For the moment you are supposed to use the following options to set the
version string:

-DKICAD_REPO_NAME=stable -DKICAD_BUILD_VERSION=4.0.2

And you encouraged to enable the python scripting, even though it is not
enabled by default with the following additional Cmake options.

-DKICAD_SCRIPTING=ON -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
------

> +     (list "-DKICAD_SKIP_BOOST=ON" ; use system boost; otherwise, it tries to download one and fails.
> +     ; TODO -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
> +     ; TODO -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=...
> +     ; TODO -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=...
> +     ; TODO -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=...
> +     ; TODO -DDEFAULT_INSTALL_PATH=...
> +     ; TODO -DKICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
> +     ; TODO -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
> +     ; TODO -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON

What features are missing without them? What is OpenSSL / TLS support
used for?

> +   ; TODO optional doxygen for source docs

Do we just need to add doxygen to native-inputs?

> +   (inputs
[...]
> +       ("libressl" ,libressl)

Unusual choice but I don't object to it. This would be the first package
to refer to libressl in our tree.

> +   (description "Electronics Design Automation Suite")

This should be more descriptive in the final patch.

> +; TODO extra options for Python (which) and for version.

Ah, I see you noticed the text on the download page :)

> +; TODO kicad-doc, kicad-library, kicad-footprints

Do we need to add the library and footprints at the same time as KiCad
itself, or can they come later?

We should try to offer the docs from the start.

[0]
http://kicad-pcb.org/download/source/