Why are some plugins not installable through the plugin manager in KiCad 8?

External Plugins
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I installed KiCAD8 on two Linux boxes at home and one Windows box at work last week. Kudos to the KiCAD team for the polished product! I think that when KiCAD can export in ODB++ (promised for version 9), no Altium and no Allegro will be a match for it!

Anyway, I observed that the plugins ‘pcb-action-tools’, ‘Archive 3DModels’, ‘kicad-action-scripts’ (very useful because it offers via stitching!), and ‘Pinout Generator’ are listed in the plugin manager but cannot be installed. I wonder why and whether they can be installed the old way. If they cannot be installed through the plugin manager, then why does the plugin manager bother to list them?

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One common reason is because the owners of the plugins have yet to update their plugins to work satisfactorily with Kicad 8.0.0.

I corrected your typo in the thread title.

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Er…

image

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I partially corrected the typo in the thread title. :slightly_smiling_face:

Made another attempt on my way to sit in the corner.

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@retiredfeline, thank you for the correction, sir!

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@jmk, bottom line, should I install ‘kicad-action-scripts’ by hand the old way? The author of that plugin claims that it is KiCAD8-compatible.

Thanks for correcting my typo.

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There is an Ubuntu issue at the moment. See this thread.

Just to clarify that thread.
There are three Kicad versions available.
Kicad 8.0.0
Kicad 8.0.0 nightly testing, which will become 8.0.1 soon.
Kicad 8.99 nightly testing which will become 9.0.0 next year.

Whatever work you do in 8.0.0 nightly testing will open in 8.0.0
Whatever you do in 8.99 WILL NOT open again in 8.0.x

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@jmk, thank you for all this information! In my case I do not have problems with all plugins; I only have problems with the plugins I mentioned. The plugins I mentioned appear uninstallable (I spelled it correctly this time, LOL!) on Windows as well, so this is not a problem specific to Ubuntu.

I am eagerly awaiting 9.0.0 because it will even the playing field against Altium and Cadence (OrCAD/Allegro) since it we have been promised the option to export to ODB++. But, but, but, where did you see that 9.0.0 is slated to come out next year?

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Archive3dModels should as of today also be available to install and work on V8. It took a while to test and migrate all of the plugins to V8.

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There is a new version every year, usually around Feb.
This development cycle started with Kicad 6 in Feb.2022.

New features are added for about 9 months; starting from the release of the current stable. Three months is then spent sorting out the X.99 for release.

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There’s no promise to implement it, only some new volunteer to whom this task was assigned because he was interested in helping and promised to look into it. Sorry, but there have been quite many tasks over the years which have been planned and assigned to somebody, and then postponed or given up. The chance is better than zero but still not a “promise” by the KiCad project or team.