Schematic Symbols Everyone Is Forced to Download

We can speeak about compromise when someone move all of DTR devices to separate library.

Right. DTR was massive used in JP Hi-Fi and car audio. But today they are still nice devices when you don’t have much space on board to include base resistors.

They are not obsolete just for a different use case. WRL files are needed for better renderings. (Example if you want to render your pcb in blender). The reason for this is that wrl can define material properties. (diffuse, specular, ambient, emit and transparency). Step only knows about one color (KiCad stepup exports step with the diffuse color of the wrl file.)
And they are needed for the stable version. (Only nightly supports step.)

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Not everyone lives where you live. In my case I only have 800 MBytes a month with maximum speeds of 70 KBytes/s, I had been a week without internet for having spent the quota last week. And I have no chance of increasing it.
Download version 4.0.6 (426 MBytes) took me several hours. If the size is passed from 700 MBytes I just can not download it.
The option of dividing it I think is the best.

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I would suggest someone who is affected by this problem alerts the developers via a bug report. Simply ask nicely if it is possible to have windows installers without 3d models in addition to the current installer that includes everything. (The user can always download the 3d models you want. And the 3d lib will only grow in the foreseeable future making the problem even worse.)

Maybe remind them that for some linux distributions the lib is a separate package already. At least in ubuntu. Fedora sadly is also lacking the separated package for the libs.

If someone makes a bug report link it here such that others can easily find it.

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I think that it is time for the Ubuntu PPA to split library into footprints and 3D

Are the footprints shipped via a package in ubuntu? I thought only symbols and 3d models are included in the installers. Footprints are by default setup to use the github plugin. (At least this is the information i got from Wayne when i asked about it for the 4.0.7 release.)

Some certainly are, but not all. (4.0.7 package)

These are the moments I wish I had an account on the dev mailing list :wink:

Can’t seem to find anything in relation to that existing on the bugtracker though…

Bug reports often vanish into thin air

As a Windoze user, I picked just one random example of a schematic part that I will likely never need; nor likely will the masses that download the Win KiCad package, each and every time there is a subversion update.

I am NOT suggesting that the content be REMOVED.

I am suggesting that the content NOT be RE-DOWNLOADED every time for a minor version update on Windows.

The current Windows now approaching 1GB in download; to RE-download much of which is already priory downloaded with the previous sub-version.

And this is for every single windows user Is there not a cost for all this wasted server transmission bandwidth on the server side?

Well. I think there is a problem with installer compression settings. I ask my redactor in chief for his alternative INNO script, which he use to create his own KiCad Windows installer. The effects are surprising:

The official KiCad release 4.0.7 has a weight of 722MB.
The last KiCad Nightlies BZR8471 has a weight of 750MB.
The KiCad Nightlies from INNO script has only 352MB!

The compression setting used by INNO is:

SolidCompression=True
Compression=lzma2/ultra

So, IMHO KiCad installer may be lighter, at the expense of a longer compile time.

Could you post the Inno script used to build the installer?

Sorry. This is not my script and I don’t have a permission to publish them.

Maybe asking your redactor if he wants to share it could be a chance… :slight_smile:

It must contain less then. I tried compressing the 4.0.6 Win64 installer with 7-zip on “ultra” and took 436MB down to 413MB, about 5% reduction and no binary compressor is going to do much better. Only a compressor that understands wrl and step and can find commonality and therefore redundancy between multiple models will improve on that

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Nope. The 3d models are completely new in this version. 4.0.6 had nearly no step models. 4.0.7 has a lot of them.

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Here you can download installer I created. I didn’t test if it fully works, so use at your own risk. It is based on recent nightlies. No files were removed before script was started.


MD5: 72D1D2569151480ABFAF5A1C0E76D2CD

I think the key setting is solid compression.

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My (small amount of) experience in submitting bugs is not that they disappear, but are labeled as “wishlist” even if the issue is a showstopper for your particular purpose. My guess is that if the issue is categorized as “wishlist” in the Bugs list, then it will receive little attention unless a developer gets interested in the Bug. It still is the primary method of documenting priorities for developers and for others to chime in on impact to help determine perhaps a change in priority.

I think the overall system of volunteers and development is working well for an amazing set of code, libraries, and documentation.

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So the 3D model is getting simplified?

No. Te small files are combined into one longer file where compression algorithm has better ratio.


That’s why footprints and 3D models occupied less space in installer.

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