kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Carsten,

On 1/14/19 1:19 PM, Carsten Schoenert wrote:
> Hello Wayne,
> 
> Am 11.01.19 um 21:08 schrieb Wayne Stambaugh:
>> I doubt we will default to gtk3+/Phoenix anytime soon but I do think it
>> would be a good idea to create a build using this configuration so we
>> can get wider testing.  I'm guessing that for the most part, it's only
>> devs using this configuration which severely limits the amount of
>> testing we have.  Whether or not it would be a good idea to make this
>> the default configuration for Debian Buster and later is a another
>> thing.  I don't think we have enough good testing information at this
>> point to make and educated decision.  I'm opposed to it but my fear is
>> if things go sideways, we wont have the manpower to react in a manner
>> that wont alienate users.
> 
> I'm a bit supersized that there is no plan to configure the current
> KiCad development version at least with GTK+3 backend as default given
> the original plan to eventually have a RC ready before or around Fosdem
> and 5.1 should support GTK+3 fully.

Making Phoenix and python 3 the default option will cause problems on
windows builds because there is no msys package for Phoenix.  The
Phoenix project in it's infinite wisdom ignores forcing the compiler to
gcc on windows so it will require a patch to make this work like it did
in wxPython.  I suppose we make this the default on linux.

> 
> I'm not sure this will scale well to find possible outstanding GTK+3
> issues while about 95% of the users are pulling from
> http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org or from an PPA. As no one has raised the
> hand to your last email I must assume all these resources are currently
> build with the default build options which is using GTK+2, but maybe I'm
> wrong here.
> 
> So anyway, I've done some work based on my plannings and created some
> branches for doing a Debian packaging of KiCad snapshots from the master
> branch with GTK+3 and wxPython4.0 enabled scripting support for Debian
> experimental.
> 
> As Debian has started his freeze for Debian 10 (Buster) right on the
> last weekend I won't do any uploads of KiCad snapshot versions to Debian
> unstable currently and will use experimental instead.
> 
> I uploaded a version 5.1~20190114.a0a4e5e+dfsg1-1 some time ago and the
> build machine are working on this. Depending on available time slots I
> will upload newer versions maybe about every 2-4 weeks.
> 
> The current build config can be seen in the git tree on Salsa within the
> file debian/rules in the variable DEB_KICAD_CMAKE_OPTS.
> 
> https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/KiCad/kicad/blob/debian/experimental/debian/rules#L39
> 
> I appreciate any suggestions to improve this config!

Is it the policy of Debian to specify default options for documentation
purposes?  You have a lot of defaults redefined.  I build KiCad on my
Debian testing box using:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
-DKICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON ~/src/kicad-trunk/

All of the other options are enabled by default.

> 
> I've installed kicad with this config and so far it looks really
> promising, no problems or issues so far. But I'm not a heavy user and
> I'm using no NVidia or Radeon graphic card.
> 
> So testers (which are using Debian testing or unstable) are welcome!
> I've no plans to do backporting this to stable (Stretch) as this is
> mostly impossible due missing GTK+3 related packages.
> 
> Note, you need to enable the experimental repo in your sources to be
> able to pull the kicad packages. Or you install them manually if you
> know what you are doing.
> 
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=kicad&suite=experimental
> https://packages.debian.org/source/experimental/kicad (It will take some
> time to see anything on this link!)
>