Hello,
there is a lot going on with the official libraries right now which did already create a lot of confusion. Here is a rough overview of the current state and what that means for contributors and users:
GitLab migration
All library assets have been moved from GitHub to Gitlab about 3 weeks ago.
- The GitHub repos are now archived
- New repos are at https://gitlab.com/kicad/libraries/
- The kicad-footprint-generator and kicad-packages3D-generator which were previously maintained outside the kicad-org can also be found there
This was done by the gitlab importer. Issues and Pull requests got imported, they are now called merge request. If the github-user could not be mapped to a gitlab-user those issues and merge requests are now owned by kicad-bot.
v6 symbol library conversion
Converting the symbol libraries can be done with libedit. Open the v5 .lib file and save it as .kicad_sym. Unfortunately that has to be done individually for each library.
Most likely it will be possible to automate that via the python-api in the future (no ETA for that feature yet).
KLC updates
- All new contributions to the library must be done with the nightly version from now on.
- Existing open merge requests need to be converted to v6.
- The KLC is not yet ready for all v6 features. Expect it to change, especially for symbols. The footprint part should stay roughly the same.
KLC rule checker (Travis-CI -> Gitlab-CI)
The rule checker was ported to work with v6 library assets and to run on GitLab-CI instead of Travis-CI.
- The output of the check scripts is visible in the MR. It is now called Pipelines.
- The code for symbols is rather new, expect quit a few bugs
- Footprints did not change much, but there are some known bugs which are not yet fixed
- We added unit-tests to the KLC rule checker, but they are not done yet
- Most of that work is done here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/libraries/kicad-library-utils/
Updating merge requests
Unfortunately there is no simple workflow to update a merge request. The importer did also import the source-branches for each MR, but they are not writable by contributors since they exist as branches of the main repository.
Thus, it is recommended to close the imported merge-request (ask a maintainer to do that for you if its owned by kicad-bot). Then fork the gitlab repo, push your changes to a new branch of your fork and open a new merge request.
Support for v5
The library team will focus on v6 development from now on. Nevertheless, branches for v5 exist and bug-fixes can be merged there if required.