Barely installing this board causes sketches for unrelated board to fail to compile

[teo1978]

I installed the ESP32 cores on the Arduino IDE via the Board Manager.

Then I opened a sketch that uses another board, the ESP8266 Thing Dev from SparkFun, which is one of the board in a separate package: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino.

This sketch used to complie just fine. The old board is still selected, I am trying to compile the sketch (which I haven't touched) for the same ESP8266 as before. That is, I am not even using the ESP32 core I just installed.

Yet I get compile errors like this:

Error compiling for board SparkFun ESP8266 Thing Dev.
fork/exec /home/teo/.arduino15/packages/esp32/tools/esptool/2.3.1/esptool: no such file or directory
Error compiling for board SparkFun ESP8266 Thing Dev.

Basically, merely installing the ESP32 board backage has messed with the preexisting ESP8266 package that was previously installed and worked fine before. Obviously I should be able to have both installed ans working.

[teo1978]

Also, when removing the ESP32 board, a NullPointerException showed up (though they seem to have been removed succesfully):

[teo1978]

And now, after (supposedly) removing the board, sketches compiled for the Sparkfun ESP8266 board (which should never have been affected in the slightest in the first place) now behave strangely. The board cannot connect to wifi anymore. It keeps saying "scandone" and "reconnect" debug messages while trying to connect to the wifi network. It never showed this behavior before, and I haven't touched the ESP8266 cores (haven't updated them, I have the same version that always worked), nor of course my code.

The extent to which just installing this board (without even attempting to use it) has screwed up with my Arduino installation is appalling.

Maybe part of this is bugs from Arduino itself (e.g. the part where several files from this fucked up board are still present in my system after I have used the Board Manager to remove it). Please report to them whatever parts of the issues are their fault.

[lbernstone]

I understand your frustration, but the esp32 board package installs nothing outside of the .arduino15/packages/esp32 directory. Any interference with another board's core files is entirely an arduino IDE issue. I regularly use esp8266 and esp32 to compile without issues.
Good luck

[teo1978]

Please have a loot at the response from the Arduino team:
arduino/Arduino#8258 (comment)

From what I understand, there is a fundamental design flaw in the Arduino IDE, but also an error on your side, or at least a trivial workaround that you could apply to easily avoid the issue completely.

[lbernstone]

Ok, I'll take a look.

[teo1978]

It may be that the issue only arises if one of the board packages (e.g. esp8266) is installed directly into arduino's program folder (which, as far as I understand, is what you do when you want to install the most recent version from github as opposed to the latest stable release) while the other (e.g. esp32) is installed via the Board Manager which installs it into ~/.arduinosomething. I don't know if, by installing both in the same way, everything would work.

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