Feature Request: BlenderBim to Bonsai migration guide for a clean setup

[swiss-knight]

Hello,

I'm trying to keep myself up to date and I noticed the recent changes about the renaming of the former BlenderBIM add-on to Bonsai.

First of all, thanks for having shared the history and the steps which conducted to those changes with the community, this is really nice in a world were transparency is more than ever needed. And congratulations about the integration as a true Blender add-on 🚀🥳 ! Also good luck for changing the name everywhere... especially inside screenshots and images (e.g. here https://docs.bonsaibim.org/guides/development/hello_world.html or throughout the IFCOpenShell website).

By the way, I recently updated Blender to 4.2.1 and discovered that the BlenderBIM add-on I had installed a few months ago was no longer activated. Worse still, it wasn't listed in the “Blender Preferences > Add-ons” tab, even though the add-on files are still present on disk:

/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.1/scripts/addons/blenderbim
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.1/scripts/addons/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.xml
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.1/scripts/addons/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.desktop
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.1/scripts/addons/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.png
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.1/scripts/addons/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim

In order to correctly remove this BlenderBIM add-on, I first tried to "re-install" it properly using the file I downloaded some months ago: blenderbim-240501-py311-linux.zip.
I was able to reinstall it but I noticed that the file was installed in a slightly different folder structure:

/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.2/extensions/user_default/blenderbim
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.2/extensions/user_default/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.xml
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.2/extensions/user_default/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.desktop
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.2/extensions/user_default/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim.png
/home/<username>/.config/blender/4.2/extensions/user_default/blenderbim/libs/desktop/blenderbim

In addition, it is no longer possible to activate it by checking the box:

I'm now wondering if it wouldn't be enough to simply delete the files listed above? Or do I need to take some other action?

In order to have a clean Bonsai installation, publishing somewhere a kind of official “migration guide” for people in the same situation would be a great help.

Thanks for your kind help and the amazing work done around Bonsai and IfcOpenShell!

Warm Regards.

[Andrej730]

@swiss-knight

Old versions do not support Blender 4.2, use the latest releases. See https://docs.bonsaibim.org/quickstart/installation.html

Folders you can remove to make sure nothing will get in the way:

1. addons/blenderbim addons/bonsai
2. extensions/user_default/blenderbim extensions/user_default/bonsai
3. Preferably extensions/.local/lib/python3.11/site-packages but you may need to restart some other extensions after this (disable and enable), if you have any other extensions installed that have dependencies in this folder.

[Moult]

Not just for Bonsai, but for all add-ons, the safest way to migrate is to start with a fresh 4.2 installation. All locations of where Bonsai exists are documented here: https://docs.bonsaibim.org/guides/troubleshooting.html#where-is-the-add-on-installed