I am sorry about that, but I saw in their workarounds a tone like “this is the way and shut up”, so the “tone” thing is a two way street.
One guy even said it is impossible to make everyone happy and this is not Word.
Anyways I agree with you: a developer would have answered as you did and I am glad you did because the issue is pretty straightforward.
I am going to be only on the gitlab site.
KiCad contains a lot of QA test harness code, but there is no way for a developer to check that nothing gets broken. This is why running the Testing builds is important - so many variations in usage, machine hardware and OS
Apparently you need to do so that the developer had such an opportunity? why do other developers have it and kikads don’t?
There is no consumer. There is only the collective KiCad community. If you want to use the efforts of that community, then great. If you want to contribute, then even better.
But if you have expectations beyond that, you’re likely to be dissatisfied. (Or you need to pay one of the commercial entities for KiCad support – at which point you are a consumer and can reasonably have expectations/demands.)
look at other free products such as freecad libre office then compare with what happens with kicad figure out what needs to be done…
I think they don’t realize that this software is at a stage that things are becoming serious.
I am willing to donate a percentage of the revenue if I can use it effectively as a tool in my day to day work.
I just want to clarify, by no means I wanted to offend the Dev team or bash on the project. I think you are doing great work for free and it is to the benefit of all of us.
My frustration came from numerous issues since the release of V7, and is not tied to a single incident.
I remember one of the versions V7.0.2 or maybe V7.0.4 (don’t remember which one it was) was simply crashing because of some “null” parameter in some symbols. This was never an issue in V5/6 (blank/null param is an empty box in symbol properties, not a software crash as it is in V7).
Took me some time to track it down and fix those symbols with text editor as any interaction through KiCad would lead to an abrupt crash of the project with no saves or logs.
This warning appears every single time I now try to open the project (i did not save this project after initial crash). Schematic did load however PCB (board) file loaded into a blank screen. After system restart I still get the same message on that project files but now the PCB loads as well.
Another one for example. I have a project with roughly 100+ parts and when trying to route a track on the top layer (where all of the components are) sometimes (and only sometimes) the PCB editor starts lagging. No issues when I try to trace tracks on the back side, where there are no components. (12 thread CPU, 32 Gig RAM, GTX1080 PC).
Regarding providing more info on the crashes - I’d be happy to, but there are no logs to provide.
Thanks for the heads up! I do have a few plugins, but all were installed via kicad plugin manager and not sideloaded. I’ll check on them!
Regarding the warning about files already open, check your project directory for files ending in “.lck”. If found, you can safely delete them. This is a “new” feature from 7.0.6 that tries to warn users if KiCad files are opened in multiple instances. More details available elsewhere on the forum and on gitlab. One relevant issue is here: Suggestion in popup for possibility of lock file left in project after crash (#15148) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab and it sounds like the behavior is adjusted for the future.
Try disabling your plugins maybe?
Yes, that (plugins) is the problem. But, if I can’t use my plugins (homemade) then I may as well use Fritzing or other…
I think the best way is to fix the plugins if you don’t want KiCad to crash.
If there’s a bug in KiCad that prevents from fixing it, then report the bug.
I could be wrong but, there is Nothing wrong with my plugins. They all work well. All are mine except for the one’s that come packaged with Kicad (such as below).
I can live with it…
Since they crash KiCad, they probably do something wrong. And on the screenshot, these are footprint wizards, not action plugins.
Yes, I know that. But, they are in the Plugins folder so, to me, they are Plugins.
The ‘Wizard of Oz’ was a wizard but to me, he was still a Tin-Can. Okay, a useless comment but, my point is, though ‘My Plugins’ may contribute to the problem (and, am willing to live with it) it seems to me that if a Plugin Folder is provided by Kicad, then valid User plugins shouldn’t cause a problem. Especially when the plugins are per the Kicad Plugin-making documentation.
I’ll leave it, and posting on this topic, at that… (sort of reminds me of Apple’s reluctance to admit they have problems unless forced by circumstances to admit it…).
Thanks for your insight…
Ok… A user plugin is a program that can do anything. This is not actionable unless these plugins are available.
I don’t understand… ‘Actionable’ to me means if you click the button (of Plugin, for example) it would take some action. All of my Plugins Work thus, to me, they are all Actionable… But, perhaps it’s a Language interpretation of what ‘Actionable’ means.
And, the Buttons show up in the Kicad main panel.
For example, if I say (in English) “I have a headache” a non-English speaking Spaniard may not know what I mean because a Spaniard would most likely say “Me duele la cabeza” (or, Dolar in la cabeza) which means in English, “I have a pain in my head”
‘not actionable’ here meant that there’s not enough information to try to fix the issue.
I agree with you on this one. KiCad is no longer just a free tool but a tool that many people depend on and some are making a living of it.
Pumping out “stable” releases yet having users be the guinea pigs is a questionable approach, especially for the things that used to work in the previous versions and are now causing issues. Why would they change the plugin approach if the new way proves to be problematic and full of issues that cannot be resolved - a rhetorical question.
In reality there is nothing I could not do in V5/6 that I can do in V7 and as weird as it sounds, some things in V5 were more user friendly in my opinion. The biggest improvement in V7, and again speaking for myself, is copy pasting parts of schematic/pcb setups into new projects - that I agree is a big improvement, but that’s about it for me. I wish I did not migrate and stayed with the stable older versions.
I get what you’re saying. Perhaps a better way of saying it might be:
“There is not enough information to help me/others take corrective action to investigate/fix it”.
But, you said "…unless Plugins are available.
And, of course to be helpful, you might add what information you would need to be able to take action (to make it actionable)…