Building KiCad on Windows

Software
1

Dear

The description on https://kicad.org/contribute/build-windows/ is NOT working.

I used the instructions step by step:
Get MSYS2
Follow the updating packages to update.That is you probably need to do:
pacman -Sy; pacman --needed -S bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime
Restart the MSYS2 shell
pacman -Su
pacman -S base-devel git
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
cd ~; git clone https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages.git
cd ~/MINGW-packages/mingw-w64-kicad-git
makepkg-mingw -sLi

At the end I got the followin error:
remote: Repository not found.
fatal: repository ‘https://github.com/blairbonnett-mirrors/kicad-doc.git/’ not found

What is a working way to build it using MSYS2 ?

best regards
Daniel Schöni

2

Ohh well, the pkgbuild needs to be updated upstream to msys2, I might do that soon.

Meanwhile you could just remove the references to teh kicad-doc.

What is your goal with building? Because you usually don’t really need to docs to build KiCad.

3

Thank you.

I found that several things in the download version of 4.0.0 Pre-release are not working.
So I tried to make a new build. Because I don’t really understood what’s going on building it, I didn’t understand how it works.

Best regards, Daniel

4

So I found out what to do.

In the downloaded folder “mingw-w64-kicad-git” one will find the file “PKGBUILD” which contains all the base instruction to build.

I had to remove:

  • The source definition containing “git+https://github.com/blairbonnett-mirrors/kicad-doc.git”
  • 1 ‘SKIP’ in the “md5sums” definition
  • The whole section containing the build of the docs ("${MINGW_PREFIX}/bin/cmake.exe -G “MSYS Makefiles” -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${MINGW_PREFIX} …/${_realname}-docs")
  • The package command (“make DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install”)

Then the build was working.

By the way:
What is “install” meaning ?
It does not produce any installation package nor even a working application. All the dll’s are missing. The executables are working but missing the dll’s.
Sure, one can copy the whole result over an existing installation and replace all the existing executables - it is working - but that’s not an installation.

5

You just need to run it from within the mingw shell in this case. But FYI a new rc2 build have been released.