Packager recommendation: require installation of symbols and footprints with KiCad

[Jon Evans]

Hi all,

It recently got brought up that on some platforms it is currently easy to install KiCad without also installing the symbols and footprints.  This causes issues for unexpecting users, because KiCad doesn't currently do a good job of allowing users to recover from this situation after they've already set up a blank library table.

While we'd like to fix that on the code side for V8, we also think that for best user experiences the KiCad libraries should be distributed by default with KiCad for all platforms.  In other words, users should have to do something out of the ordinary to get KiCad without the libraries, rather than being able to forget to do a step that installs the libraries.

We understand that the libraries are sometimes excluded by default due to their size.  We recommend in this case treating the 3D models (which are the majority of the size) separately as an optional dependency, since there is no problem with installing 3D models after the fact.  The key is to get the symbols and footprints (with the corresponding default symbol and footprint library tables) at the same time as KiCad.

Best,

Jon