Everyone makes their own decision about the update rate, but if someone wants to ask a question here about 5.99 or create a bug report, the version should definitely be up to date first.
The only big change for ordinary users before release candidates is to make the content manager fully usable. Therefore at the moment it’s pretty realistic to not update and still use KiCad without hitting bugs.
My experience pretty much mirrors yours. No major issues.
It seems Geographical BackAnnotate to schematic does not yet work.
The re-annotate of the PCB worked fine, it seems.
But the back annotation to schematic, “update schematic from PCB”, just gave “… not found” for every component/footprint. Did not work.
Time to create a bug report?
I should note that I’m running KiCad on Arch Linux. There is an AUR package for kicad-nightly that installs in parallel to KiCad 5 and works very well.
Yet another bug (I think):
Rotation of symbols in Schematic is lost.
When opened in 5.1.10:
When opened in the nightly build “kicad-msvc.r24563.bb5c58b3cf-x86_64.exe]”:
I think that the pictures speak for themselves.
A “stupid”(?) question: How do I create a bug report?
In your “Help” Menu, click on “Report Bug”
Note, we’ll ask you to attach the original 5.1.10 schematic, project, libraries, etc that are needed to recreate the issue.
Thanks Seth, I didn’t know either where to report, I have seen quite som things going on in the Mac version; BTW, I have started liking KiCad a lot mor during the passed days while been sitting intensively with it…
… But after registering/signing in to GitLab I don’t have a clue what to do there, why I’m in there… ah, now i see, after creating a GitLab account when clicking on “Report Bug” in Kicad it goes to the place where to do the reports, I guess…
Oh no – it happened again! As mentioned yesterday I’ve started to like KiCad more after sitting intensively with it but now I don’t know if that’s still the case, this happens over and over again, runs fine for a few days, then goes wrong again, seems to be random and I have no idea why…
I have also removed the files in “~/Library/Preferences/kicad” and still doesn’t work, still the same popup error message “ERROR Environment variable path cannot be empty”.
The screencast isn’t completely clear but it looks like the path causing problems is the /Library/Application Support/.
Have you tried ‘escaping’ the space i.e.
/Library/Application\ Support/?
I also thing that ApplicationSupport (with no space) is symlinked into Application Support so you could try that too.
Thanks John, quick and good ideas as usual from you! Though, before reading your reply I deleted ALL files again from the installation of KiCad (with “App Cleaner & Uninstaller Pro 6”) on this drive and tried to make a new install of version “kicad-unified-20211004-141409-eb819a3b25” = Version: (5.99.0-12680-geb819a3b25) but the same problem was still there, the same message popped up again/3d libraries did not work! So I removed every trace again and installed an earlier version of KiCad, which worked without that message/= I could change the paths in /Library/Application Support/ without messages. But as I want the latest possible version of KiCad I updated that “old” version to 5.99.0-12680-geb819a3b25 once again, and right now it’s working again (at least 5 minutes ago). The question now: Does this feel "safe”? and the answer is not at all.
Sure, I agree - that doesn’t sound safe but the point about ‘nightly’ builds is to pick up problems. If this is a consistent and repeatable error then it should be reported.
Yes, it seems to be repeated and I have reported this a few times here now. I will not report on GitLab, it’s not easy to understand.
It seems to me that your issue is likely caused by not understanding path variables in kicad. You have not clearly explained what it is you are doing that results in the issue. If you can find exact steps you take that reliably reproduce the issue it will help us help you.
“It seems to me that your issue is likely caused by not understanding path variables in kicad”
May be so. But if it was not very clear in the video I will do my last try tomorrow to try to explain it again. As it just happened here again right now. This time I tested to rename the “path” SSD and once again it was impossible to “configure path” in KiCad to that SSD, or any hard disk/SSD/path, as I also showed in the video. Then, again, I reinstalled an earlier version of KiCad, and now, once again I could “configure path” in KiCad. After that I updated to the latest build, and it seems to still work then, at least the last 5 minutes…
Apparenlty the paths are set up wrongly here.
I can not be of much help as I only run Linux, and also do not know very well how KiCad hanles those environment variables for the paths, nor do I know what they should be for windows.
If I try to change one of KiCad’s default path variables in KiCad I get the message:
When I look at the environment variables from a terminal window, I only see 5 of KiCad’s “environment variables”.
@paulvdh that is linux nightly specific thing, if I recall correctly. Some distribution packages (ubuntu?) define environment variables in kicad nightly launcher script externally to the kicad config/process, that’s why you get that warning. Not the case on Mac (which OP is using)
@TheSwede in your screencast deleting the path is expected to not work (if you want to delete the variable you need to select the row, not value, then press delete or click trash icon below). But changing folder to another one should work and looks like a bug to me.
Which version worked? Also when you say worked do you mean editing the variable or seeing the models in viewer or both?
Is this the latest one that doesn’t work? Again, which part doesn’t work specifically.
I don’t use kicad on mac so won’t be able to help further but someone with mac should be able to confirm your issue if you narrow it down to specific thing like:
Version x.xxx.xxxx, editing path variable by clicking on open folder icon and selecting a folder doesn’t work and shows message “xxxx”.
Bug reports raised here may not be seen by the developers though - I know it’s a pain but reporting a bug on GitLab is fairly straightforward - there is even a direct link to report bugs within KiCad.
