When will Kicad 5 be available?

There is no 4.1. The newest (and last) is 4.0.7

Be aware that we are not quite finished with the reorganization effort. Take a look at the included ToDo.md file for details and look at the issues of the repo. (the todo list what old lib has been transferred already vs what is missing and the issues list the problems we found. Most problems are regarding the renaming of footprints and footprint libs.)

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The current Nightlies are already better quality than 4.0.0 was at release… Remember that OSX was a mess in early v4

If you already have V4 and current set of libraries then the smartest thing would be to wait for V5 and then migrate from V4 to V5 and also to new libraries.

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Are there plans to create a well-tested, illustrated, write-up for how this remapping is done? And post it on the KiCAD “Blog”, or some other very accessible, obvious, location?

When the new symbol management feature was announced on the Forum, the remapping process sounded rather involved and varied based on how you were using the library system. The complexity of the conversion process convinced me to stop using nightly builds, until release of KiCAD 5 (or at least until that release was imminent).

Dale

There is a blog post, and a recent thread IMPORTANT: Symbol Library Table Merged into Development Branch

I don’t know how comprehensive the write-up is, haven’t tried it yet!

Officially, KiCad is in version 5 feature freeze. There are a few segfault bugs that have to be fixed before I will create a version 5 branch. This branch will become release 5-rc1. From that point on, the length of time it takes until the final stable 5 release depends on how quickly bugs are reported and all high priority bugs get fixed. I’m hoping to have the version 5 branch done before FOSDEM 2018 (February 3-4, 2018). If all goes well, a stable 5 release could happen sometime near the end of Q1 2018. As most things open source, it will be ready when it’s ready.

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“…it will be ready when it’s ready.”:+1:

Who inspired you, Yogi Berra? :smile:

On https://launchpad.net/kicad/+milestone/5.0.0-rc1 says 5.0rc1 expected to 07/01/2018.

Unlikely unless the sym table bug is confirmed fixed and the alias symbols is working

Ummm . . . . what is the native culture of the person who posted that date? The Launchpad page shows “2018-01-07” which is most likely a reference to 7 January. (But even that isn’t certain.)

Written out as “07/01/2018” it could also point to the first of July.

Dale

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It’s worth pointing out that I’ve made this optional because it has some known performance issues for some people and some use cases that we’re not going to be able to fix in time. It’ll be disabled by default to avoid annoying too many people (as it’s hardly a critical feature), you’ll want to enable the last option here if you want it:

There are some other improvements to the symbol chooser that don’t involve footprints, which will still be there, but they’re minor. Of course they involved a total overhaul of the underlying code, but y’all won’t see that :upside_down:

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This will be a nice feature. At the moment the thing I find easiest for finding a footprint is to grep the directory or open up PCBnew and browse.

Well, I don’t think it makes finding footprints any easier. The intent is for it to support a workflow similar to how other popular EDA packages work, where rather than matching symbols to footprints later, you place “components” with fully paired symbol+footprint already in library — KiCad actually does support that, but is missing some functionality that’d make it easier to use so I figured I’d fill that out a bit.

I’m very excited to see that the net highlighting is an improvement that’s listed.

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I’m currently working on a number of fixes for hi-dpi displays (think Retina) that will make it into v5, maybe worth adding to the list as KiCad is currently painful on my 4k display (even though I’m just considering them bugfixes rather than features).

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New clarification from wayne: The hope is to have a release candidate for FOSDEM and a release by the end of march:
https://www.mail-archive.com/kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net/msg27604.html

Fixed the thread title.
The 4k work is good, I am thinking about buying a big new PC display

The big item there is icon scaling, which wx has no real support for under gtk2. The toolbar icons are less than 2mm across on my display and totally unreadable without leaning in :confused:

I just fixed a bunch of other UI sizing issues last night and today, which should be coming through into nightlies soon.

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All dates on Launchpad are ISO format YYYY-MM-DD. The date in question now reads 2018-01-27… it does say “The target date is tentative” at the top. IOW the date is just a guess.

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