Anyone with project inside knowledge could explain how mature/stable file formats of current 5.99 versions are?
Since it’s in Feature freeze stage it should be already known if there are any fileformat-related tasks pending that might influence their final shape?
Or is it still too early?
There will be arc shapes in polygons in pcbnew.
Edit: I don’t know of any other planned changes. One unplanned happened already due to fixing a problem. It may be the last bugfix as well, but who knows.
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Arcs in polygons is the only planned change that isn’t in yet. There may be unplanned changes to fix bugs up until the first release candidate.
So it seems that I should stay on 5.1 with production, and do only some synthetic testing for 5.99 since otherwise I may end up with an icompatible file format which will not be opened properly in future “6.0” release.
It would be an extremely unlikely situation for 6.0 to not be able to open a 5.99 development build file at this point, now that the formats are mostly frozen. That said, we don’t explicitly test or guarantee that a release version will be able to open files created by every nightly build, so using development builds for production is still not a good idea unless you are willing to take the risk that you may have to do some manual file editing to work around some change in the future.
If my livelihood depended on it, I would not use KiCad V6 for at least a few months after it is released, and keep a keen eye on any bugs that show up.
Related to this:
Now both Eeschema and Pcbnew have an S-format based file format, any file changes should be localized, or at least easy to recognize by the file parser.
Now the result of opening one of KiCad’s files with an older version results in a message that the file was made with a newer version of KiCad and can not be opened.
I have a strong preferences for KiCad doing it’s best to interpret it’s own files, and showing (with option to save) all parts that can not be interpreted.
I have stayed with my present 5.99 version as it seems to work pretty well. I am using it peripherally for my present job. I have so far ordered 3 different (relatively simple) boards with it. But on this forum I keep seeing references to 6.0 as if that is already available. I do not want to risk loading any newer builds right now. For Windows 10 I am curious as to whether there is anything called 6.0 available yet in the nightlies? Short of installing it, I do not know how to distill that information from the nightly download install filenames. The build I am using right now is:
Application: KiCad
Version: (5.99.0-2908-g9a4f92dfd9), release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.5
libcurl/7.71.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1g (Schannel) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.3.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.3.0) libssh2/1.9.0 nghttp2/1.41.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
Date: Aug 21 2020 11:01:41
wxWidgets: 3.0.5 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.73.0
OCE: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.71.0
ngspice: 32
Compiler: GCC 10.2.0 with C++ ABI 1014
Build settings:
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON
No, there’s nothing called “6.0” for now; this name will probably show up with the RC1 release, up to this point it will be officially referenced as 5.99 aka “almost 6.0”.
Thanks for the enlightenment, fred4u.
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