Just a thought, Kicad supports integration with Github and maintenance of the libraries installed in /usr/share/kicad, however because those files are owned by `root`, they are not user-editable. The user could theoretically run Kicad as root, but this is, at best, poor taste. Arguably, I could point Kicad at some other directory. Then I'd be keeping two copies of everything. In my case, I'm a sole user of my machine, so I just `chown -R ${USER} /usr/share/kicad`… which works until I update Kicad as the installation will revert permissions back again. It'd be nice if the directory were owned by a `kicad` group and the files/directories made group-writeable, so that I as an administrator can assign trusted users to that group. The directory should probably be marked as protected by Portage so that the user has the right of veto over any changes made there too.
The libraries in kicad are a bit painfull. There is no backwards compatibility. If you work on a real multiuser system, where the user kicad updates all libs, all users will get problems the new library. I think the libraries lives ideally in the users home folder, alternatively we could provide more (and more frequent) lib packages too. /usr/share/ is meant to be a static folder. It should not be maintained dynamically by git. If they want to write there, it should be filed as bug upstream. /usr/share/ is under package manager regime in all clean distributions. can Kicad update in a folder like ~/kicad/mylibs too? I suggest therefor we close it as wontfix.
Gentoo did not promise to follow the fhs strictly, but it is a good idea to follow it where possible: Other distributions are stricter on that. Here a link for the upstream bug ticket. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA
I have discussed this with xzcvczx from upstream. This is a misunderstanding. Kicad is not meant to update files in /usr/share. The kicad update feature should run as user to update libs in the users home or in memory. Please discuss further question on the upstream support channels. I close here as wontfix. Best, JS
