Hi @robodlc. I see you already found some sort of solution, but in case it might be helpful to others who experience a problem installing the ChipKit boards platform in Arduino IDE 2.x, I'll post this anyway:
What do you mean by "install it from github"?
I just tried installing a ChipKit boards platform according to these instructions:
It failed with this error:
Installing chipKIT:pic32-tools@1.43-pic32gcc
Failed to install platform: 'chipKIT:pic32:2.1.0'.
Error: 13 INTERNAL: Cannot install tool chipKIT:pic32-tools@1.43-pic32gcc: searching package root dir: no unique root dir in archive, found 'C:\Users\per\AppData\Local\Arduino15\tmp\package-2569908807\bin' and 'C:\Users\per\AppData\Local\Arduino15\tmp\package-2569908807\lib'
Arduino IDE 2.x is more strict about the structure of the boards package archive files than Arduino IDE 1.x was. The incorrect structure of the archive file for the "pic32-tools" tool dependency of the platform is the cause of the error I experienced, as discussed here:
The easiest workaround will be to use Arduino IDE 1.x to install the platform. Once you have done that, you can switch back to using Arduino IDE 2.x, which will recognize the platform you installed via Arduino IDE 1.x after you restart the IDE.
The download links for Arduino IDE 1.8.19 are listed here:
https://www.arduino.cc/en/software#legacy-ide-18x
You can have Arduino IDE 1.x and 2.x installed at the same time without any problems, so you don't need to uninstall Arduino IDE 2.x before installing 1.x.
That was quite an odd conclusion to jump to.