I used to end up with some real Frankenstein systems so I try not to screw with the ‘recommended’ versions. Kicad is one of two exceptions now. The other is SageMath. Both are end user apps anyhow.
Just checked and it looks like Debian finally supports SageMath. It wasn’t even an option in Jessie. It used to be an easy compile for Debian and the developers used it but just gave up trying to jump through the Debian hoops. At the time I think their live distro even shipped on Debian.
There are no official PPAs from the KiCad Team, so far I know Jean-Samuel isn’t a official member, he is providing packages through PPA on his own and users of Ubuntu appreciate this. But that’s not the point. Ubuntu has no active maintainer for KiCad packages but they pull in the packages from Debian. So long nobody is take care on the packages in Ubuntu for older LTS versions there wont be anything newer than the version the LTS release was made. PPAs are just a way to workaround this circumstance. So that’s what people think why Ubuntu is “better” than Debian. Canonical is a company and they want to earn money so they making the rules.
I will prepare backports of KiCad for Buster and Stretch as long it is possible. I do this in my spare time as also Jean-Samual is doing.
And where is the difference to an PPA?
If users don’t know about this they also do have to stick around some older versions, not a real good reason. And backports are mentioned on the download site for Debian as well as PPAs for Ubuntu.
That’s a thing you can’t blame Debian on and by the way, the same problem is / was happen in Ubuntu. The reason here is a technical reason related on the various STL standards of C++. And I did have to deal with that already for version 5.1.0 simply because downgrading a packaging isn’t the correct way and not possible on the build daemons. So please distinguish always correctly.
The nightly builds for 5.1.x are back in https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/index.html?prefix=windows/testing/5.1/. Thanks Nick.
EDIT: they have gone past 5.1.3 already because 5.1.3 has been tagged earlier.
So they are actually pre-5.1.4
There’s discussion going on about skipping 5.1.3 and moving directly to 5.1.4 due to a bug which was introduced after 5.1.2 but before 5.1.3. Nothing dangerous. Packages and installers for 5.1.3 on many platforms are already out, it would just go unannounced and would be short lived.
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg41786.html
The release candidates would be a good idea if we think anyone would test them.
I know that I would test a version considered a “Release Candidate”; and I expect that others would also if the RC contains no-known bugs at the time of release.
This may be important information. Are there others who would test release candidates of bugfix releases, but not regular nightly builds between bugfix releases?
I would definitely suggest a name change for the “stable” series of nightlies. The concept of nightlies is already alien enough to many inexperienced users let alone having two so vastly different things share the same name.
Maybe reducing the number of builds and calling them release candidates might be an option to get around that. (With reduced builds it might be even possible to expand the number of platforms available.)
The nightly 5.1 fork build would still be useful for testing purposes, I wonder if the 5.1.3 issue was due to the hiatus in the builds before the tagging, so a bug was not tested.
What would be great was if this daily build was just the bin section, no libraries, to get a small file size.
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg41795.html
Wayne said:
I’ll update the release announcement and there will be no official 5.1.3 release.
5.1.3 won’t be officially announced, 5.1.4 has been tagged and will be released and announced soon. There are 5.1.3 packages out there but it shouldn’t matter. This hassle was due to one bug which caused updating the footprints on a board to loose their positions. But now we got some other bugfixes, too, without waiting much longer 
I notice there a a couple of REVERT commits just before the 5.1.4. tag, and 3 more just after the 5.1.4 tag. Are these newer revert commits important for 5.1.4 ?
String changes were reverted in order to tag 5.1.4 using the same translations as 5.1.3. After tagging, the reversions were themselves reverted. The net effect was to get the bug fixes into 5.1.4 but keep the strings unchanged.
What?
is it still reverted?
…and is it contagious?
This means that the modified text strings will eventually be in 5.1.5 and translated.
Towards the end of the year perhaps unless lots more critical bugs pop up
Several Linux distros have packages ready in some repositories.
Adam Wolf wrote about 9 hours ago: “MacOS is building. I am out of town and return tomorrow. If there are no issues I should be able to get them uploaded tonight, if not, Sunday.”
Windows binaries are aldready here: https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/index.html?prefix=windows/stable/
I can see the Windows binaries, but the macOS binaries haven’t been built or uploaded yet.
https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/index.html?prefix=osx/stable/
Look again (Right now there’s one package; another for another OS version should be coming soon…)
I have seen 5.1.4_ and now 5.1.4_1 Windows versions on the Previous Stable page
Guys be patient. A few devs are currently on holiday so it simply takes longer than normal to get everything together for all major platforms (see mailing list).
The blog post is already prepared and i think nearly all packages should be build. (Testing is another story) So it will only be a couple of days till the release is announced.