Wayne Stambaugh has sent a message which has not yet appeared in the mailing list archive. He says: “Things have quieted down quit a bit so we should be close to an rc2 release.”
And: “Hopefully, there wont be a lot of critical bugs and we can roll out v5 by the end of April.”
It looks like RC2 will be actually packaged for more major platforms than linux, so it will probably be “released” in the proper sense of the word instead of just tagged. The nightly build have been and will be ahead of the RCs but they haven’t included the component libraries. I believe the released RC will be a complete standalone installation, at least I hope so.
Thanks a lot for the advice. Since everyone uses Eagle 6.5 I went with that to make things easier for my supervisor and colleagues and even more important, to make it easier for me to ask questions like you’ve said.
Currently using Kicad 5rc2 nightly (April 10 release), and must say that I won’t go back to v4!
Wow! Such a nice upgrade. More functionality, much more user friendly!
The only problem is with jumpers with built-in bridges: these cause DRC errors. Freeroute can’t route the board anymore. My solutions is (for now) to use the jumper without built-in bridges, route the board, and then replace the jumper with the built-in bridge.
Apart from v5 having a much more logical and consistent UI, a lot of the GitHub bug fix commits must actually also apply to 4.0.7
My experience is that 4.0.7 used to crash far more than recent Nightly builds. Also many Windows 10 users are having problems with 4.0.7 since a Windows update.
And admin access as he suggest to put the libs into a system directory.
It might be better to put the libs into a user writable directory and point the environment variables to that location (kicad main window -> configure paths)
This assumes that the fp-lib-table and sym-lib-table that come with the lib are used. (This is also the case if one puts the libs into the system location. Even the linux packagers will not update the tables!)
That is not working for me, even though I have manually removed the Windows environment variables settings and untick the box in the installer for setting them
edit: I have found that manually creating Windows Environment Variables works, but you need to be Administrator to do this
Yes I thing I open the box with my gift with ver 5.
I started learning kicad v4 three months ago and after the announcement of V5 in FOSCEM 2018 I decided to go for v5 . This is RC2 stable release (windows nightly build May 13).
Things are pretty cool now with 3D and libraries and many more.
The thing is that in pcbnew there is only one view (no opengl , default ,…). That is good but…
Freeroute is working, interactive route is working but no internal autoroute like the previews version.
Does anybody has more info on how auto routing or interactive routing in 5?
(any docs highly appreciated)
Thanks
First of all, rc2 has not yet been released.
And even if it is released it is not a stable release.
The rc series releases are so called release candidates. They are development builds. What sets them apart from nightly is that there is exactly one commit tagged as rc1 (or rc2, …)
The rc series can be seen as milestone markers. (Bug reports are connected to them.) So every rc tag has a set of bugs connected to it that must be fixed before the tag is set.
Sadly there is no way to easily install rc1. Maybe rc2 will get a more official release that will allow users to run that particular release more easily.
What you really run is the nightly build from sometime after the rc1 tag has been added to the source repo. What sets nightly builds right now apart from nightlies from a year ago is that kicad is in feature freeze for quite some time now.
If i remember the announcement correctly, RC2 will be the string freeze release (after that no graphical interface changes will be allowed. This will allow the guys from the documentation team to update their docu)
Rene_Poschl1d thanks for your replay.
One thing that absolutely understood from your info is that before version finishes RCXX cycle developers are unable to write a manual. Hopefully this will happen as soon as possible.
The part I misunderstood is that my nightly build now says “5.0.0-rc2-dev-756-gxxxxxxx) release build” . That is May 18.
If understand correctly this is not the official RC2 but just unofficial rc2 given to nightly build ? and what this release build stands for.?
Anyway looks that it it only a litle time until we have the thing oficialy out and developers start writing or finishing the manual
Meanwhile I am working with V5 and hoping my system will not crash. I am making small boards at this time.
As far as I sow from another post the old “OPEN GL” mode is done now with Modern toolset accelerated -F11 and that is working fine (from Preferences) .
My method of working is to follow V4 manual see what is applicable in V5 and read everything I see posted here (or elsewhere) about V5.
Any post from a guy that discovers something will be grate help at this moment of “darkens” concerning designing with kicad V5
Anyway I am not coming back to V4. I do not have the time to learn things that in some days or weeks will be PAST.
I am always looking forward for good news…
Creating a version number system is difficult when there’s a version control system with small commits. The version numbers are based on some tag plus the git commit. KiCad developers chose the system where there is the next planned version number (in this case 5.0.0 rc2 where rc2 means a release candidate version before 5.0.0), then “dev” which here means it’s a development version leading to the beforementioned version, then some release number (I don’t know what it means TBH), then gxxxxx means the specific unambiguous git commit.
Maybe it would have been better to choose another system, for example “previous_released_version+gxxxxx” where “+” would have meant, well, previous_released_version plus some git commits. It would have been less ambiguous in my opinion. At least it wouldn’t have lead people to hastily interpret it meaning they have the 5.0.0rc2 version at hand which actually hasn’t been released yet.
