Up until a few days ago, it was common for members here to recommend to others to use a nightly build to get a specific feature. In the past the nightly builds were generally very well behaved.
As can be seen from the recent posts here on the forum, this no longer seems to be the case.
From the FAQ:
If you want to experiment with a nightly build, then it is my opinion to recommend a V5RCx nightly up to 15JUL18. I also recommend extreme caution when attempting to use a V5RC3 nightly after 15JUL18.
On Edit: That maybe should be “up to 13JUL18”.
About the timeframe mentioned, KiCad developers tagged V5 and made some different development branches. It appears that this has caused a little bit of an “out of sync” issue on the different builds.
Because in the last few months Nightly had become the Release Candidate snapshot for what will be V5.0.0 and had become very stable.
After 16th July Master has come the development for what will eventually be V6 and this includes the new schematic structure. This means that backwards compatibility with V5 is not automatic and crashes are likely.
Actually the next version will be 5.1 which will be file compatible with 5.0, and at the moment it’s done in the “master” branch which is the source for nightly builds. This will change later, but right now there won’t be file format changes. Crashes are not only likely, they are mandatory
Of course, one of the bugs might accidentally screw up file format, which has happened before… the nightly is now back to more “experimental” quality rather than “nearly release candidate”, which will probably fool a lot of people who have been using nightly and assume it is relatively bug free. I think we are already seeing that in the problems being reported here.
So, based on the above, the last recommended nightly is from the 15:th of July 2018. Sadly that file is no longer available (http://downloads.kicad.org/windows/nightly/). Is there another place I can download it?
Will there be an official v5RCx download available somewhere?
Today Master and 5.1 differ by one commit, while 125 commits away from 5.0
You would expect 5.0 to be largely stable, but as 5.1 is meant to resolve the wxPython and Gtx2 hell on most recent Linux, some major shuffling will be needed.
The official place is https://kicad.org/download/. Unlike v4, the packaging of RCs for different OSes has been patchy, there haven’t been any for Windows.
So the official properly released and packaged new version will appear at the above link and will be 5.0.0 (or maybe 5.0.1).
Maybe a pre-release test, maybe final, who knows but the packager who put it there.
Really guys, when KiCad is officially released there will be absolutely no doubt and the news will be broadcast far and wide. It is not like there is a proper release somewhere but we are keeping it quiet
The packages are build right as we speak. As not all packagers have the same schedule it might be that some operating systems could get an early unofficial release. (Meaning people who know their way around the kicad ecosystem could find the correct installers early.)
Wayne will wait till most of the important packages are build and got a bit of testing by the devs, then the release announcement will be made.
We have a full thread just about speculating when v5 will be released. This is the message that gives the latest details: When will Kicad 5 be available?
