Future of the Hardware folder within the Arduino sketchbook folder

[Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith]

Hi everyone

I have looked for detail on this on Github and on this forum - please let me know if I have duplicated a thread or am missing information. The new Boards manager is great, but I have a project where I wish to circumvent this (largely because there is no way of installing via the Boards manager except through the Arduino GUI). If I carry on using the Hardware folder to keep my plugin cores in, how long will this be supported? Does Arduino have a roadmap that suggests this will ever be phased out, or just a secondary "less preferred" install location?

S

[Roger Clark]

Hi hope the legacy support for cores in the hardware folder is not removed.

I can see this would be an issue for anyone using a core where the developers are no longer active, or choose not to jump through the hoops to maintain a package file.

Personally, with Arduino_STM32, I don't want to use the Boards manager, before our core is constantly being enhanced by the users / community and hiding it away in a hidden folder etc is no good for us.

Also, I push changes to the repo several times a week, and unless I setup some sort of automatic package generation, e.g. build a CRC on the fly etc. Its going to take extra time that I don't have, in order to maintain the version control, that I get by default using GitHub.

If Arduino choose to remove legacy support for cores in the hardware folder, I suspect most of the Arduino STM32 community would leave the Arduino IDE and we'd probably move to Eclipse (though it would take us some effort to achieve such a move)

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[Peter Feerick]

I can't see this going anytime soon. Especially since the spec for the hardware folder was only 'recently' updated for the 1.5.x IDE series! I expect the hardware folder will remain for self-installs/builds and customisations, and the packages folder will be used for click 'n use distributions.

https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Arduino-IDE-1.5---3rd-party-Hardware-specification

Peter Feerick
BIT, BLDes CQU

[Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith]

This is all good to know - we're going to push ahead in any case, I was just seeing (a) if there was any official work on this and (b) to gauge any community feel on this. Personally I think it should stay, even if only to ease development cycles on a local machine before porting to a Boards Manager release at a later date.

Roger, Peter - thanks for taking the time to respond!

                   

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Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith

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[William Westfield]

On May 31, 2015, at 4:59 PM, Roger Clark <syne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> hope the legacy support for cores in the hardware folder is not removed.

Well, the more (and more publicly) it is used, the more likely it is to stick around…

(Is the list broken? It’s been really quiet for a week or so…)

BillW/WestfW

[Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith]

List doesn't seem to be broken to me - quiet is all. Assuming everyone is busy working!

S

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[Tim Leek]

The sketchbook\hardware folder is the best place for user hardware. 

I don't think it makes sense to include the hardware folder with the ide. It's already confusing that it only contains AVR and no longer any SAM cores, The downloaded cores should be the master and not confused with a possibly earlier or later version in the arduinoide\hardware folder..

It's good of Arduino to host the new boards manager system for their own and competitors boards. Great that we have the sketchbook\hardware folder. 

I don't think the use of non-arduino hardware under the arduino ide folder should be supported and therefore what place does the folder have since 1.6.3+??

-1 for keeping the Ide\Hardware folder

[Simon John]

i'd prefer it if the boards manager used the ~/sketchbook/hardware directory instead of a hidden directory ~/.arduino15, same goes for libraries

[Roger Clark]

Numerous people, including me have advised the IDE developers that the hidden directory is not the correct location for the boards.

There are various technical reasons for this, e.g. its against Microsoft guidelines to use the %appdata% roaming folder to store exe's  etc,

There are problems on Linux as well, and probably OSX

However all our requests have fallen on deaf ears.

I don't know what would need to be done to persade them to change their minds.

BTW. I'm responsible for the STM32 (lib maple based) repo for Arduino on STM32F1 boards, and I'm not doing a boards manager package for various reasons, and I'd say that 90% of the people using Arduino for STM32 don't want to use the boards manager.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:36 AM, Simon John <synapticc...@gmail.com> wrote:

i'd prefer it if the boards manager used the ~/sketchbook/hardware directory instead of a hidden directory ~/.arduino15, same goes for libraries

[Cristian Maglie]

Hi.

I confirm that the support for $SKETCHBOOK/hardware folder is not going to be removed.

The boards manager is an additional feature that you may want to use or not, it depends on your needs, but you're not forced to.

About the installation folder on windows, we are aware of the problem and we are working on a solution.

If there are other issues, feel free to report them on github and we'll try to work them out as well.

Thanks!

C

[Simon John]

that's good news cristian.

as far as the installation folder on windows goes, don't forget its also a bad idea on linux and mac to store compilers etc. in home directories.

apart from being a pain to backup, not very scalable on multi-user systems and a security risk, it may simply not be possible on home partitions mounted with the noexec flag (e.g. nfs) or even with quotas set. also users are going to wonder where several hundred megs of storage space is going. i can't see any distro packaging the ide if its going to store its files in home directories.

i fail to see why we can't just store the gcc toolchains within the arduino application (/usr/share/arduino with symlinks to /usr/bin, /usr/lib and /etc) like we always have for avr.

[Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith]

Thanks for the confirmation Cristian - great news. I am very much in favour of the Boards manager for certain applications, but very glad that we have the option to carry on the way that things currently are.

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[Federico Fissore]

Simon John ha scrito il 08/06/2015 alle 16:13:

>
> i fail to see why we can't just store the gcc toolchains within the
> arduino application (/usr/share/arduino with symlinks to /usr/bin,
> /usr/lib and /etc) like we always have for avr.

Simon,

your question has already been asked. Look at the previous threads. In
essence: normal users don't have write permissions in "c:\program
files\arduino" or /usr/lib/arduino

Federico