Better compatibility to Android IDE local packages installation

[mfulz]

Hi,
I've create a patch to be able to use my ~/.arduino15 installation directory from the arduino ide.
Without that I wasn't able to retrieve the boards I've installed with my normal user and the actual ide 1.8.x into my user home folder.

I hope you're going to include that into the mainstream :)

[stevearc]

Thanks for the PR! Sorry for the slow response, I've been off the grid. I think this is a great addition, but I have a couple requests and some questions before merging.

[stevearc]

Could you take the shared logic here and factor it out into a function?

[mfulz]

Done

[stevearc]

Also looks like a lot of shared logic that could be factored out into a function

[mfulz]

Done

[stevearc]

I don't think you actually need this function. Since you do the exists() check at the top of the file, any time you're calling this function you can instead just read out the value of g:arduino_user_installation

[mfulz]

The user should be able to configure the directory, because it can be configured in the arduino ide as well.
So I think I'll need this check to verify the existence of the directory.

[stevearc]

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but at the top of the file you're doing

if !exists('g:arduino_user_installation')
  if s:FileExists(s:ARDUINO_USER_DIR)
    let g:arduino_user_installation = 1
  else
    let g:arduino_user_installation = 0
  endif
endif

So by the time this method is called, the only way exists('g:arduino_user_installation') will be false is if the user has manually run unlet g:arduino_user_installation somewhere. It seems like you could just access g:arduino_user_installation directly instead of calling this getter.

[stevearc]

Is the difference in logic here (searching /packages/ instead of /hardware, pulling out the package version, etc) due to the user installation? I would expect that boards might exist in the /packages dir even if system installed, and that boards would exist under /hardware in a user installation. Is this the case?

[mfulz]

Yes you got the point correct: I realized with your plugin, that all my hardware, etc. (installed by the arduino ide into the user dir) wasn't available.
That's why I started to dig into the code.

[stevearc]

Same question about if this is specific to a user installation

[mfulz]

Yes it is.

[stevearc]

If you want, you could default this to 1 if s:FileExists($HOME . ".arduino15"). If you do, you should probably pull $HOME . ".arduino15" out into a constant or a function

[mfulz]

Done :)

[stevearc]

I believe you'll want a closing < here

[mfulz]

Done

[mfulz]

Hi Thanks for the feedback - will check it out and update the PR :)

[mfulz]

Some Information / Questions:
During your review I realized that I've to do some additional changes and I wanted to get your feedback about them:

With my actual changes the user can only choose between the system installation or the user installation. Both can't be used simultaneously
But in my opinion there should be the possibility to use both together. Therefore I need some more changes to get into your code, to read out the system installation (like your plugin already does) and extend it to read out the user installation as well.

I would go with the g:arduino_user_installation variable and would add an additional g:arduino_user_dir which will point to the user path (as already started in my code).

The additional stuff would be to only extend your logic (boards, programmers, etc.) with the values found in the user dir, when the g:arduino_user_installation variable is set.

What do you think about this?

BR,
Matthias

[stevearc]

Yeah, I would definitely be in favor of searching both the user installation and the system installation. I'd recommend making g:arduino_user_installation be a string instead of a boolean, and allow the user to set the location of their installation via that. You could keep the auto-detect functionality for the default location, so long as there's also a way to disable it. From there I think you'd just need to modify the board & programmer search to go through both locations, if present.