I have experienced several crashes of KiCad V8. One scenario that the crash happened few times was Export of GERBERS after cloning PCB to form a Panel. Export dialog did asked if I wanted to rebuild copper fills, and after not accepting rebuild, it started to spin the Wait cursor for a while then shut down.
Other case was yesterday, when I was cleaning up my schematic and wanted to move part of it into a hierarchical sheet. I did copied the block, paste it special keeping refdefs into the hierarchical sheet and after I started to replace labels with hierarchical sheet, it stopped responding and finally crashed (force closed).
Both cases are unfortunately not reproducible, even if open same project and try to mimic the same steps. So there’s more than that behind the curtains.
How should I report that issue? Maybe with more people having similar issues, some patterns will appear.
My PC is otherwise stable, no issues with other apps so I’d rule out hardrware issues here.
Win11Pro 64bit, KiCad x64 on x64 Version: 8.0.7-36-gad41288ec0, release build
How should I report that issue? Maybe with more people having similar issues, some patterns will appear.
My personal decision for problems which are infrequently and not reproducible by myself is to not report these issues. If the developers can’t reproduce the issue on their computer (with debugger runnning) the chance to find the bug is very low.
Nevertheless you could decide otherwise. If you want to report these issues:
use gitlab (needs account), use the kicad builtin “File–>Report bug” function
this opens a prefilled form which already includes your system- and version information
delete all “comment” lines in that form, and fill out the # Description and the # Steps to reproduce section. As detailed as possible.
always add a project example. without example the chance to reproduce the issue is even lower.
in your kicad installation you could enable the crash report option: kicad global Preferences–>Data collection–>enable anonymous crash report. Make sure to generate a unique crash ID for your system.
Technically I’m able to report bugs and did so several times. However I wanted to find out the strategy for reporting such a volatile issue (untill exact reproduction scenario is found out).
I did even encountered it few times in a row, so attempted to run under Windbg and what? Of course no repro. After launching straigth (without Windbg) it also worked normally.
If these scenarios I’ve described “ring a bell” to someone, I may try performing specific actions. But I’d prefer to avoid to file a bug that can not be reliably traced.
The best thing for that kind of thing is to enable crash reporting as @mf_ibfeew suggests above, and then log a bug in GitHub (including your collection ID) if you experience a crash. If you add the approx date / time too it lets us home in on the issue.