What happened to nightly builds?

The latest one available is from Sept 19th? Either the date is off by one month or they switched to monthly builds? :slight_smile:

If I correctly recall what I gleaned from the chatter on this topic, first there was a problem creating successful builds after some libraries used by the compiler were updated. Then, a server crashed and repair parts can only be obtained from a nearly extinct breed of elves who live in a desolate and inaccessible location.

There are more details in the thread “Recommended / non-recommended Nightlies” . Look in the links from Post #24.

Dale

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Last time I checked the Internet wasn’t running low on storage space. Blows my mind. It’s been a month to a day and nobody even bothered to do anything about it. So no Winbuilder and no nightly builds. What problems do the developers have?

Well developers have a live beside kicad. I am sure if there would be an easy fix it would have been done already.

Yet again RAID controllers turned out to be less reliable than disks.
The headache for Nightlies is the bandwidth served, not storage capacity.

It is frustrating because the Windows build is now seriously adrift from the Linux ones, not healthy when the v5 release is being mentioned

Well, it’s been suggested they stop serving up the entire library with the nightly.

From reading the mailing list report it seems it is a developers machine. Not sure if he even gets paid for the hardware.

Kudos to the developer… and his machine! We can all admire a good old “can do” attitude. How about the “door” number 4? There are plenty of free hosting services which can accommodate nightly builds. You just have to be flexible. Like it was mentioned before you don’t have to try to squeeze in the whole suite into a nightly build. Chances are, people who actually bother to download a fresh copy of KiCad regularly have already build up their own libraries. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Free, unlimited bandwidth, no added bloatware and trusted by company firewalls are rare

https://sourceforge.net/ may be an option

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Does sourceforge offer a build server? (The distribution server is ok. It is the server that builds kicad for windows that has problems.)

In early 2016 Sourceforge was adding adware to downloads. They have stopped but were tainted by this, with Firefox giving pop up warnings and refusing to download from some mirrors

they have been bought from a new owner… no more ads
new management sourceforge moves to put badness in past
SourceForge now also is partnered with BitDefender to provide malware scanning of all the projects uploaded to the repository.
Moreover if the problem is the build server, then no option there.

They have cleaned up over a year ago, but the taint lingers in false positive blocker warnings - a lesson on how easily reputation can be lost

Sourceforge used to be a goto site for open source projects, had several there myself, but the boat has sailed on that. Anyway, sourceforge is technically obsolete even if they change their business practices (I’ll wait and see on that one).

I would take a close look at running a Travis build on the github source mirror. I think the Windows KiCad builds in a Windows VM, I don’t have much experience with that. Otherwise Travis can be set to generate a daily build.

Got a link with info on daily building with Travis? I have an idea for the libraries that could make use of that.

Sure https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/cron-jobs/

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A current state of the libraries page? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Maaaaaybe… It will take some work so don’t expect anything soon :wink:

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The KiCad Windows nightlies http://downloads.kicad.org/windows/nightly/ are 740MB files served from the downloads server of kicad.org, which traceroute indicates is in France. The bandwidth for serving these is a separate matter from the failure of a developer’s Windows machine https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg31003.html .

I tried downloading the 2017-09-19 nightly several times with Firefox. Perhaps because I am in Australia, it was taking a long time and the process eventually stopped. I guess Firefox had some timeout. This happened several times, so I used wget from my virtual server at Hetzner in Germany. This proceeded quickly and I then used WinSCP to get it home from there.

If anyone is having difficulty downloading this nightly, you may be able to get it from this copy more easily:

http://www.firstpr.com.au/temp/kicad/kicad-r8510.dddaa7e69-x86_64.exe

The 2017-09-18 one is

http://www.firstpr.com.au/temp/kicad/kicad-r8504.3b7fbad1b-x86_64.exe

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