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 :)

[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.