Default location for templates folder on Windows often not writeable

What exactly is the bug, and what exactly do you suggest?
What are the stories with files dissapering?
So you know about appdata roaming?

This is correct, KiCad should not be writing to anything in Program Files. I cleaned up one place where it was doing that recently, what are the others?

@Chris, what was the revision number of the commit where you fixed this?
 I looked at your last few commits and I don't see anything that fixes
any windows path issues.

On 2/10/2016 4:46 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> This is correct, KiCad should not be writing to anything in Program
> Files. I cleaned up one place where it was doing that recently, what are
> the others?
>

It was 6047, way back in August. The project manager was creating a noname.pro in IIRC the working directory, which ended up being ProgramFiles\KiCad.

We need clarification on what windows paths are getting written to that are not supposed to be. In the past we have had users who have modified the footprint and/or component libraries that shipped with KiCad and then they got overwritten when they installed a new version of KiCad. This is to be expected and there is nothing KiCad can do to prevent you from doing that as long as you have write permissions to the installed library files. The only way to prevent his is install KiCad as admin and make sure none of the users on the system have admin privileges or just copy the libraries to a path the user does have write permissions. It's always a bad idea to modify any of the libraries or templates that get installed with KiCad because they will be overwritten the next time you install KiCad.

As I understand the complaint is for the template folder, if one want to change any of the default profiles etc., as indicated it is not possible to write to that folder. However as is stated above it would not be wise to change these files when in that location. A custom location can be specified in the Kicad path configuration under the name "KICAD_PTEMPLATES", and those files placed in a writable folder, for instance in the user home directory.

Fixed in revision 5678a166eeb6c68644b53247276b40e50e61351d
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=5678a166eeb6c68644b53247276b40e50e61351d

Allowing users to write to paths for which they do not have write permission doesn't make sense. I just committed a change that allows the user to create user template folder where they can add their own templates. Actually you could always do this but the path was hard coded and unless you read the Eeschema user manual, you would have no idea it existed. Now there is a KICAD_USER_TEMPLATE_DIR internal environment variable which defaults to the old path but can now be changed by the user if preferred. If this option is not acceptable, you will have to install KiCad to a folder where you have write permissions.