The pcb-action-tools plugin wasn’t working for me in KiCad 7, and after checking the Github project for it I realized that there was a new release (1.0.6) while the version KiCad had installed was almost two years old (1.0.4). Manually installing the new release fixed my issue.
What’s the process for updating plugins in the repository? Is it a manual process where someone needs to be notified if a plugin is updated to bump the version number? It would be nice to fix this particular issue for pcb-action-tools, but I wonder how many other plugins may be out of date.
Plugin package maintainers (usually it’s code repo owners but not necessarily) need to push updated version list to kicad plugin manager repository. It’s a simple but manual process.
new versions are added to plugins repository via merge requests on gitlab - there is some time penalty to that approach. Based on my experience, it takes few days between release and acceptance to official repository. It becomes problem when package maintainer want to publish some quick bugfixes.
There are two user-experience improvements I’m considering for my plugin:
add background task to check if new version available on plugin start - display ‘new version available’ somewhere in the plugin’s window
encourage users to use ‘non official’ repository in case they want latest/testing revisions - I already did some testing - it is not that hard to prepare own repository and host it on github pages for example and update it on CI builds
I’ve been stuck in merge queue for over an month now. It is a lottery. Some PRs have been opened after mine and are already merged.
As I mentioned earlier, I added ‘non-official’ repo which I deploy to gh-pages and update automatically on each master change. See kicad-kbplacer repository and kicad-kbplacer repository
I think you should feel free to give a ping if you’ve been waiting more than a few days… usually they get merged quickly but people are busy and sometimes things get missed.
