Pre 5.1 Windows Nightlies

Software
19

Bug report time then.
I particularly need one commit that missed the 10th January build

20

Wrong way around.
The old nightly from 1 month ago had that error, the latest from the 10th Jan doesn’t, at least as far as I can tell.

2 Likes
21

Anybody with time to test and not in the middle of a critical project, might be interested in trying http://downloads.kicad.org/windows/nightly/kicad-r12210.b1a2c5d7c-x86_64.exe

There have been a lot of last minute fixes to zone filling, track dragging, via placement, DXF import, block copying and many other things that make life a lot better, but really need wider examination before 5.1 comes out.

4 Likes
22

Nightlies don’t have PDF docs, while stable packages include them.

When I get around to it, I’ll split off the library, that should make things a lot saner.

2 Likes
23

I noticed the Nightlies don’t include the help files

24

3 posts were split to a new topic: Missing libraries on opening a schematic

25

Yes, help files is not included.

26

Wayne tagged 5.1rc1 yesterday. It means that the latest nightly build is already post-rc1. The download server has been moved to CERN, it’s now https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/index.html?prefix=windows/nightly/ (see the Download page of the KiCad home pages).

Has anyone else than I or David experienced this bug on Windows: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1814053? Upgrading to a newer nightly build sometimes causes KiCad to hang when trying to open pcbnew for the first time. It would be good to get this solved before 5.1. Please test!

The overall quality is already good enough for migrating to nightlies from 5.0 (or even from 4.0). When releasing new software version there’s always the chicken/egg problem: it’s not well tested because people don’t want to use unstable software. To get people to test the software the stable version must first be released. In practice the released version is as unstable as the nightlies before the release. So, please install and test to find possible problems now - otherwise you will find the problems later in the final release! I don’t see a reason why the latest nightlies couldn’t be used for serious work.

1 Like
27

BTW, this is what Wayne has said about the release schedule:

I would really like to get 5.1.0 released by the end of February. This
means the libraries, documentation, and translations would have to be
tagged for 5.1.0 around 2/23 to give our package devs some time to get
the packages built and uploaded to the website.

Knowing how these things have gone before, this may not happen if you don’t take the nightlies and test them with your normal workflow. If you do, the latent bugs are found and fixed quickly. If not, they are found one by one slowly and the release date is moved forward day by day.

28

Yes, kicad becomes un-responsive and when tried to close, crashes.

[kicad-r12301.73a0cbff6-x86_64.exe]

and restarting kicad, gets a message, “kicad is already running. Continue?”

update: now everytime gets the “kicad is already running. Continue?” message.

29

Let’s make sure it’s the same bug, so confirm if these are true:

  1. It happened when you tried to open pcbnew, either from the project window or from eeschema.
  2. It happened right after you updated from an older nightly to a newer.
  3. If you continue and open KiCad for the second time, it (probably) works again. It doesn’t happen twice with the same nightly build after it has been installed. (Altough with some nightlies I couldn’t open pcbnew at all and had to install another version. But this was rare.)

Can you also give more details about your OS and hardware? And did you install KiCad with default settings or do you have some special setup (I don’t install libraries at all from the installer)?

30

I’m not sure but I believe you can get rid of this by rebooting Windows. It’s an ugly implementation detail in wxWidgets which uses a mutex on Windows to check for single instance.

31

Yes, crash happened when opened pcbnew from eeschema immediately after loading schematic and couldn’t reproduce for 2nd time.

OS - Win7-x64
HW - Lenovo T420 Laptop, Intel core i5-2520M cpu, Intel HD Graphics 3000

Installation settings:

No library
No env variables (there is a possibility of bug here, when installed with env var enabled and if added personal env var for personal libs, the paths gets disappeared from Preference>Configure path settings after a couple of kicad instances(open and close))

“kicad is already running. Continue?” error exists even after reboots.
kicad launcher>eeschema and close -no issues.
kicad launcher>eeschema>pcbnew and close the kicad.exe is still running on the process.

32

when creating a new footprint, on footprint editor>footprint properties window, doesn’t close by Esc or cancel from the 3D settings tab( try 2nd time)?

33

I don’t think that this is the same bug, When I got the hang, I tried to close the application and got the Window is not responding dialog. Close the window with that and restart KiCad always worked first time.

34

The “already running” dialog coming up may be (partly) independent problem. It may come, but not necessarily, in a situation when KiCad has crashed and the process lock hasn’t been released properly. I’m ready to believe that there’s only one cause for this pcbnew opening hang/crash.

35

[ Disclaimer ] Don’t get me wrong : I really like KiCad and do my best to promote it around me.

Besides this, according to what I read, there won’t be any updates after 5.1 until v6 which shouln’t be available until at least one or two years.

As there probably won’t be “usable v6 nightly” either before a long time, we will be stuck with 5.1 for a long period. It means that several current “low/medium priority” bugs / wishes (tracker vocabulary) won’t be addressed until then (if ever). There are chances that the 5.1 release will also bring many additional bug / wish reports on its own.

I fully understand that dvpt time and effort are limited by the nature of the project, but maybe it might be desirable for v5 to continue to evolve alongside v6 dvpt (especially regarding pcbnew because the v6 effort will be more on the schematics + symbol libs), at least until v6 nightlies are usable ?

36

There will be updates similar to how it was handled between 5.0.0 and now and as it was handled in the v4 series.
These updates will be limited to bugfixes. (That is after all what it means to have a stable version!)
So all bugs that are marked as something else then wishlist can (and probably will) be addressed by future version 5 releases.

37

This is incorrect. There will be 5.1.1 and possibly 5.1.2 (depending on the length of time until 6.0). All crash/corruption bugs discovered in 5.1 will be fixed in these lightweight releases. Please see the stable release policy for details.

We do not plan on releasing a 5.2.

So what is the difference? Assume that the version string is XX.YY.ZZ:

  • In ZZ increments, we fix crashes, corruption and (maybe) lightweight usability fixes that can easily be backported from the master branch. An example of a usability fix would be the fix for lp:1814893. This is annoying and likely a small fix, so it has a chance of getting into 5.1.1 (not guaranteed).

  • In YY increments, we have changes to layout, underlying program structure or workflow. All bugs that do not involved file format changes are able to be fixed here.

  • In XX increments, we can change the file format. All program releases with the same XX number will be able to open and edit each others files. Once XX changes, the older versions may not be able to edit the files created by the newer version. So 6.0.0 will create files that cannot be opened by 5.1.0 programs.

3 Likes
38

Thanks for the details.

Actually, when I wrote “no updates”, I didn’t mean crash/corruption bugs - I was already convinced they will fixed if needed - but rather new features or UI modifications. I understand there won’t be any 5.2 for these (unfortunately).