kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 06/26/2014 04:14 PM, Jason Whiteman wrote:
> Team,
> 
>      I am new to the dev group and have compiled my first windows binaries today based on
> what was pulled using kicad-winbuilder-3.4 (Kicad BZR build 4955).
> 
>      The binaries were created fine - and I was able to load kicad.exe using RunKicad.bat
> 
>      My issue is the error:
> 
>      Failed to load shared library
>      'Y:\Kicad_Build\kicad-winbuilder-3.4\kicad\bin\_pcbnew.kiface' (error 0: the
> operation completed successfully.)
> 
>       I have searched for this error and see it is not uncommon.  However, in all threads
> I have read - the problem was with the makefile failing to copy the _*.kiface files to the
> kicad/bin directory.  This is not the case here.  I see the files have landed there:
> 
>  Directory of Y:\Kicad_Build\kicad-winbuilder-3.4\kicad\bin
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM         6,596,731 _cvpcb.kiface
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM         6,728,781 _eeschema.kiface
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM         2,771,868 _gerbview.kiface
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM        17,465,298 _pcbnew.kiface
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM         2,219,655 _pcb_calculator.kiface
> 06/26/2014  01:59 PM         2,463,434 _pl_editor.kiface
> 
>        EEschema can load, pcb_calculator loads, bitmap2component loads,  gerbview loads. 
> However both PCBNew and CvPCB fail with the "shared library" error.
> 
>        No directory contains a space.  I have checked the permissions of _pcbnew.kiface
> (which is complained as not found) and _eeschema.kiface (which has no complaints when
> loading eeschema.exe) and see no differences in permissions.  I am attempting to load as
> administrator.
> 
>        Given the software is reporting a missing file that exists, what is the issue?
> 
>        Not that it necessarily makes any difference, but I am using the
> bzr-win-zip-2.6b1-1 binaries to pull (checkout) the source.  This is not the cause of any
> issue since building was not a problem.
> 
> Regards,
> Jason


What should work is described below.  I do not know why it is not working for you, you
will have to determine that.

The program is a process.  The process consists on Windows of an *.exe and one or more
DLLs.  For all but kicad.exe, there may be one kicad DLL which has the *.kiface file
extension.  So pcbnew.exe will have its DLL named _pcbnew.kiface.  eeschema.exe will have
_eeschema.kiface.

kicad.exe may also use _pcbnew.kiface, but can also use _eeschema.kiface concurrently or
alone as well, plus others.

The *.kiface files are found by examining the full path of the *.exe from within the *.exe
code.  That path is used to find the *.kiface file(s).


This means that if you want to run kicad.exe, then all the *.kiface files that you will be
loading must also be in that same directory.

On linux if I do this from /usr/local/bin:

  $ dir kicad pcbnew eeschema *.kiface

_cvpcb.kiface  eeschema  _eeschema.kiface  _gerbview.kiface  kicad  _pcb_calculator.kiface
 pcbnew  _pcbnew.kiface  _pl_editor.kiface


they all show in the same directory on linux, where kicad.exe is named kicad.

Take care that you are then actually launching the copy of kicad.exe that you think you
are.  Maybe do it from the command line with full path as a test without the batch file,
then examine what the batch file is doing in comparison.

If you verify all the pieces are in place and it still fails with that same curious error
message, we'll have to look at the wxWidgets code in more detail.

That error message is a bit curious, as it essentially says that it succeeded.  At that
point we'd need to roll up our sleeves on Windows.


Dick