Nightly builds for Debian buster and bullseye

As written in the first post, my builds are based on the kicad-nightly Ubuntu PPA, more precisely the dailybuild branch from https://gitlab.com/kicad/packaging/kicad-ubuntu-builder.

Again, as written in the first post, the packaging for my builds is maintained at https://gitlab.com/sur5r/kicad-nightly-deb.

Regardings Python and wx: I killed the check for ancient Python versions several weeks ago and have always built against Python 3 and the corresponding versions of wx.

In case it helps for your builds, you can find build logs of my builds in the various _byhand directories in https://debian.sur5r.net/kicad-nightly/pool/main/k/kicad/.

That’s true, but this thread is about Debian builds. And problems regarding my builds MUST NOT be reported to the Ubuntu packaging issue tracker as they can not do anything about it.

Yes, of course. I wrote the things in my post because it was mentioned in this thread that

If this has actually been solved or was not a problem, then OK. Now, when I read it again, it’s possible that it doesn’t speak about your repository at all, but it wasn’t clear.

And jsreynaud was mentioned as the Ubuntu ppa maintainer, while the packaging repo and team was changed to “kicad” instead of “jsreynaud” some time ago. The situation was confusing because js is still part of the new team but he has still some legacy repo bearing his name. Just to be clear, the current nightly build repo is https://launchpad.net/~kicad/+archive/ubuntu/kicad-dev-nightly, if anyone – not you – tries to search for kicad repos and finds a wrong one.

You also said you don’t have an idea how to report to the ppa maintainer, so I gave the link to the kicad packaging gitlab page which actually has the issue database. (I wonder why you earlier said “you don’t have an idea” because you yourself link to the relevant gitlab page.)

In any case, if your package works with python3 and wxPhoenix I can try to use them as the base of dependency detection for my build on Debian.

One last question. How “stable” you think your repository will be? I mean, often such projects go silent after some time, and I would like to write build instructions which will not get old soon. So I wonder if I can just link to your repository in the instructions and expect that the repo will stay more or less up to date for example a couple of years.

I don’t personally use Debian (altough I did years ago), but thank you very much for the repository.

I have to admin I didn’t check the included scripts yet. I could flip the shebang line to use python3 but this alone might not make them work again. This should also be adressed upstream (along with finally dropping any python 2 support).

Back then, I was not aware of that repo and, more importantly, the dailybuild branch therein.

The repo will stay at least until v6 is released. But I see no immediate reason to turn it off even after that.

The supported Debian releases will change, though. For example, once bullseye is released, I will continue to build for buster only as long as it doesn’t produce additional work. Building a development snapshot for an oldstable release makes very little sense anyway.

Indeed. As for my build instructions, I wouldn’t try to get them working on old distros unless it just happens to work. Getting them to work on testing/bullseye would be fine. But I want them to be valid for the KiCad master branch after v6 (pre-v7). The instructions themselves try to be so generic that they work even if KiCad or the distro changes, but they always require packages which make it possible to install the required dependencies. The packages don’t even have to be up to date, as long as the dependencies are the same as with the git master branch of the kicad source.

To make bisecting regression bugs easier, I added snapshots to my repository.

They can be accessed using APT as follows:

deb https://debian.sur5r.net/kicad-nightly buster/snapshots/TIMESTAMP main
deb https://debian.sur5r.net/kicad-nightly bullseye/snapshots/TIMESTAMP main

The available directories for TIMESTAMP can be found at
https://debian.sur5r.net/kicad-nightly/dists/buster/snapshots/
and
https://debian.sur5r.net/kicad-nightly/dists/bullseye/snapshots/

The timestamps correspond to the UTC timestamp of the git commit being built, just as the first part of the package version number.

My current goal is to provide around 2 weeks of snapshots. I will see how that works out and will post here if anything changes.

Please note that I currently do not build all commits but only the latest. So if there are multiple commits while a build is running, all but the last of them will be skipped.

Also, I just changed the workings of my automation to build each commit.

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There are a couple of upcoming changes to the repository:

  • Builds for bookworm will be added in the next couple of days
  • Builds for buster will switch to “latest commit only” and the snapshots will be removed.

The above changes have been implemented as of 2021-09-25T00:00:00Z.

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Builds for buster have been removed due to large build backlog. I might reintroduce them if the situation changes.

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HEADS UP for those using my builds:

tl;dr: Test suite disabled on my builds.

While 6.0 was released, my builds are (of course) still following the master branch.

If some is wondering why there has been no new build for close 3 days, here’s why:

Part of the package build process is running the test suite shipped with kicad, which started failing about 3 days ago. It seems the test suite is not updated the same way the development is going forward.

As I don’t want to waste CPU cycles on compiling packages that get thrown away immediately, I’ve disabled the test suite until further notice.

Feel free to inspect the build logs if you’re interested in which tests fail in detail.

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