Unless you don’t want to redownload 1G of the same 3d models as the last release. I wish stable lite builds were also provided, like testing.
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Interesting, pretty sure you use Windows?
I wonder why Windows upgrades differ from Linux?
I use Linux Mint. Today I opened my update manager and found eight separate Kicad upgrades, usually there are just the four Nightlies.
6.0.10, 6.0.10 footprints, 6.0.10 symbols, 6.0.10 3D
6.99, 6.99 footprints, 6.99 symbols, 6.99 3D.
I can pick and choose what I wish to download from all eight.
Because windows doesn’t have centralized package management system. KiCad traditionally shipped one big installer with program, libraries, models, demos, docs all packaged in one big .exe file. In linux it’s easy to package everything separately and your package manager will take care of updating them separately as needed.
On Windows I at some point contributed to make lite installers that have the program only + optionally download the libraries. Those lite installers (about 140mb vs 1.1GB of full installer) are available for nightly and testing builds but not for stable, thats what my comment was about.
I realized that. I was just a bit surprised (being ignorant of Windows) that Windows users had to accept the 3D packages.
My 3D libraries are woefully out dated, I have rarely used them, so don’t bother upgrading them. Will probably update them when 7.0 arrives.
The policy also varies by Linux distro. Some distros make the library packages recommended. Some make them required but the criterion is not strict, the main kicad package may be satisfied by any library package that is in the 6.0 series, so one can opt not to use the latest library package. Since I have unlimited download limit, I just let the package manager update everything.
We have unlimited, at garbage download.
ADSL2, drops out at least five times a day, max. speed 450 kb/s… absolute rubbish. The provider should be paying us to use the unservice.
Each 3D library takes about 20 min. IF the line doesn’t drop out.
Ahhh, the joys of privatizing Public Utilities. 
Moved to PM as it’s not of interest to non-AU readers.
I’ve never figured out how to provide the lite stable builds without the can of worms of new users installing the wrong thing and complaining libraries are gone. That happened before with the testing builds even and makes a horrible first experience.
Technically there is, winget is now installed by default on Windows 10 and 11 as of 22H2.
Then maybe don’t link them on the kicad.org windows downloads page but upload them to cern servers anyway? Savvy users will figure out how to get to them.
winget is a glorified .exe downloader, it’s as far from a package manager as linux is from having “a year of linux desktop” lol.
It works better once we migrate to msi packages thats on my todo list. msi is the equivalent to a linux deb or rpm minus the automatic dependency install part. winget becomes the higher level manager and downloader
It’s kinda like saying fried cheese is like pizza, just minus the dough part. Dependency management is what makes a package manager. But we digress.
Can the stable lite builds be uploaded somewhere in the meantime? In the past I would just get the next day’s testing build but I’m not sure there will be one anymore since 6.0.10 is supposed to be the last one in 6.0 series.
I think if you provide lite packages somewhere it will get publicised and then newbies will get into strife again.
Perhaps the lite package should check for the existence of the standard library directories on startup and provide a do not show this again checkbox for experts who have their own libraries?
A long time ago it was a great relief to find a program that could resume a download when it was interrupted. Gosh, those times when you had your PC turned on overnight in the hope a download would be finished in the morning…
In these modern times it’s pretty much automatic and it’s rare a download takes more then a few minutes (That is, for me at least).
And I wonder, if it would be useful to set up a torrent for distributing KiCad? I don’t know how the initial thing works, but I think I can manage to set it up t help with seeding.
I think we have some work to do on the UX of recovering from a bad library table state before we publish lite versions that are easy to find.
The “help - about KiCad - copy version info” process doesn’t capture any library information. If we start getting inexperienced users running 6.0.10 with an ancient library, we have the possibility of even more muddle if the error cause is a broken symbol or footprint.
The libraries are gradually being cleaned up, but there are still errors to be fixed.
I downloaded the latest testing lite installer it’s 6.0.10-2 so this is good enough for me.
It would be nice to have some kind of “library search tool”. I’ve seen several threads of damaged or missing library tables, and the usual recommendation is to delete the whole config directory (or at least the sym-lib-table and fp-lib-table) files, and this is a very crude method.
Such a tool could:
- Verify the libraries listed in the *-lib-table files exist.
- Remove missing entries.
- Add entries by searching though some sub-directory (or add libraries found in a specific directory).
- Compare / copy from different *-lib-table files in different projects.
Many months back I wrote a KiCad 6 configuration check tool for the library tables here: GitHub - retiredfeline/kicad6cfgchk
It’s not that useful because it requires Python knowledge to install (to get the S-expression parser). Maybe if it were packaged as a plugin. But most of the people who hit library table problems are just starting off and using plugins would be beyond them. So for such people the big mallet, removing the config directory, works.
Probably it’s more useful for the KiCad application to have a self-check feature that can be invoked at any time to find problems.
Anyway it was a nice excursion (incursion?) into programming for a few hours.
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