kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Ian McInerney <Ian.S.McInerney@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:34 AM Holger Vogt <holger.vogt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> To obtain version information of the currently available libngspice-0.so
> version, you might do the following:
>
> load libngspice-0 dynamically
> initialze libngspice
> send the command 'version -s'
> retrieve some text response similar to the following:
>
> ******
> ** ngspice-34
> ** Please get your ngspice manual from
> http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/docs.html
> ** Please file your bug-reports at
> http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/bugrep.html
> ** Creation Date: Fri Jan 29 14:27:27 UTC 2021
> ******
>
> check for ngspice, get the version number
> unload libngspice
>
>
There was a discussion about retrieving the version information here:
https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/4833, and it looks like Holger
even mentioned that config.h includes the version information so that is
why Wayne used it. The main thing is, having to load the simulator just to
get the version information is a very complicated thing for our system to
handle. The ngspice code in KiCad is only in one specific window, and the
help windows are available from all programs. The reason the build-time
info (from config.h) was chosen is because that information can be exposed
to all the help windows and included in the version string the entire time.

-Ian