The libraries are the same, library.bin is just complete.zip renamed so there shouldn't be any problems if you use LDraw's library.
If you've never heard of mklist it's a small LDraw utility that reads all parts and generate a file called parts.lst with their names and descriptions. If you don't do that (and I'm not sure what packages are doing that for the users) then at startup the program has to scan all parts manually to get that information. Obviously reading 7000 files will be a slow operation and there's the problem of parts.lst getting out of date as well. Reading from a single zip file is faster than reading several loose files on disk, both because the time it takes to fopen() each file and the amount of data you're reading from disk compared to reading a compressed text file (very good compression ratio). On top of that I also cache the parts after they are read once (only if you're reading the zip file) between runs, so there's no slow text parsing when you're loading a part that has already been loaded. These days computers are faster and loading models isn't a big deal but it's still faster to load using library.bin than to use the LDraw folder. The main reason to have library.bin (which doesn't apply to you) is to avoid novice users breaking the library and to provide an easy install/upgrade. Things are much better now with complete.zip and AIOI but it's still good to offer a single package that has everything you need to run the program. I have simple installers for Windows and OSX but due to the nature of Linux I can't make an installer for it, I have to use the distro's package managers. Also think about people that don't know much about computers, if I know they haven't changed library.bin then I can check for updates for them and show a message when a new version is available so they go to the website and download a single file again and they are upgraded. At the same time there are advanced users who have their own libraries with unofficial parts. Because of those people I support reading the LDraw folder directly (a fairly recent change in 0.78, I believe). In the end I'm just trying to make it easy for new people without taking away any power from advanced users. On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 5:39 PM, Hubert Figuière <[email protected]> wrote: > Can we have a few more details about that? There is an advantage in > being able to use a share LDraw installation, ie the one coming from > LDraw.org. > > Beside the path name, which is not even much required, is there anything > ekse? > > Also what's the deal with mklist, and what needs to be done? > > I have been using leocad with the regular LDraw (not yours) and I didn't > find any problem. > > I'd be happy to help with making the proper changes for that. > > Cheers, > > Hub > _______________________________________________ > Leocad mailing list > [email protected] > https://list.gerf.org/listinfo/leocad >
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