5.0 schedule - any news?

Software
1

Any inside info on when a stable 5.0 release will be out?
Lots of nice things coming according to this:
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/kicad_status/

3 Likes
2

This is still too early to say, for now all that can be said is; it is ready when it is ready.

3

If history is a guide, the release process for v4 took from about March to December 2015, so I would expect similar for v5.

4

Hopefully not that slow this time. The sequence of the release process is:

  1. Feature freeze is announced. At this point, no new features will be allowed into the code, only bugfixes.
  2. All outstanding bugs above the “medium” priority level must be fixed.
  3. Once these bugs are fixed, a release candidate is made.
  4. If no new bugs above “medium” are reported in a fixed period of time, the release candidate becomes the release. Otherwise a new release candidate is made.

The 4.0 release added a truly massive amount of code and an entirely new graphics system, which brought a ton of difficult bugs with it, so the period from freeze to release candidate was very long. The 5.0 release has no new, huge systems like that, so I expect this period will not take so long. The potentially troublesome pieces for the 5.0 release are:

  • STEP and IGES model support, which requires a fairly large external support package.
  • SPICE simulation, which requires a fairly…quirky external support package.
  • Rewritten internal schematic library management system.

All but the last of these have already been thoroughly tested at this point. Currently, the plan is to kick off the release process and announce the feature freeze in a “couple months”.

In the meantime, I still have several UI/UX improvements I have to squeeze in… :slight_smile:

5 Likes
5

Well, don’t forget Hofstadter’s law :slight_smile:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

2 Likes
6

Yeah, that’s why I didn’t finish with an approximated release date!

7

Will there be a hint somewhere once the nightlies adapt this code?

8

Nightlies should already have it. There is currently no noticeable difference for the user, except perhaps the presence of some bugs unfortunately - this is only to enable features later.

9

I thought that there was going to be a new symbol library table like the footprint table?

10

Oh, so you got some intermediate code between that and the component libs that you just swap out and from there on it will be component files in library folders?

11

Not sure if that’s for 5.0 or 6.0, but it’s not the bit of code I was talking about and I don’t know to what extent that is covered by the library code refactor I just mentioned. I’ve yet to look through what was recently added in depth.

Yes, the new system allows the possibility of multiple file formats, so we can just add format support for the new style once that comes.