KiCAD 7.0.1 released

[johnboxall]

Smashed out a few bugs, etc.

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2023/03/KiCad-7.0.1-Release/

[Doctorandus_P]

It's about once a month for bug fix releases (in the 3rd digit of the version number), so halfway in march was about expected.

I also count 103 bug fixes, (so that's about 3 per day on average) and that is also about what I expect for a new mayor release for KiCad.

[Benta]

Just installed it as upgrade from 6.0.11.
Haven't gotten around to really using it yet, but the leap was much smaller than from 5.1 to 6.0.

[SiliconWizard]

As with any major version upgrade, it will make your projects and libraries incompatible with v6. Obvious, but something to think about if you're collaborating with people who may have not upgraded. Do not rush it and plan, if that's your case.
For hobbyist use, of course it usually doesn't matter.

Otherwise, 7.0.1 fixes a sizable list of bugs so that's a much better bet than 7.0.0.
Still a few annoying quirks. One of them that I mentioned is that navigating hierarchical sheets has become much slower than in v6. But you get a sheet navigator. Switching sheets (unless they are practically empty, it worsens with the number of symbols and connections) takes in the order of 1s in v7 (it's an order, will of course depend on your computer), while it was much faster in v6. While many people don't seem to care much, I find it pretty annoying and it's been confirmed, so improvements should end up in a future release. Apparently, the development branch 7.99 already has improvements. Of course, for those who don't even use hierachical sheets, it doesn't matter.

I otherwise like the new features in the schematic editor, and also the "complete trace route" feature in the pcb editor, something I had been waiting for. The initial footprint placement has also been improved, so that should all make layouting more productive.

[Benta]

As with any major version upgrade, it will make your projects and libraries incompatible with v6. Obvious, but something to think about if you're collaborating with people who may have not upgraded.

Too true. My enthusiasm has disappeared, and I'm reverting to 6.0.11, which has always done what I expected.
KiCAD 7 is not able to integrate my personal libraries, although they have the same names, format, location etc. And there's no function in 7 to fix this.
I have to add each and every personal library manually, which is intolerable.

Lousy upgrade IMO.

[SiliconWizard]

KiCAD 7 is not able to integrate my personal libraries, although they have the same names, format, location etc. And there's no function in 7 to fix this.
I have to add each and every personal library manually, which is intolerable.

Yes, you need to re-add every non-standard library manually, that's pretty time-consuming if you have many of them.

It may be possible to do this faster by copying the list directly from the corresponding v6 configuration file to the v7 one, although I'm not completely sure if that's all that's required.
When you start v7 for the first time, it asks if you want to import your preferences from v6, but those preferences don't include lists of libraries, so yeah.

To be fair, upgrading major versions with some commercial EDA packages is not much easier. Upgrading major versions of Zuken Cadstar was always a pain.

[Benta]

KiCAD 7 is not able to integrate my personal libraries, although they have the same names, format, location etc. And there's no function in 7 to fix this.
I have to add each and every personal library manually, which is intolerable.

Yes, you need to re-add every non-standard library manually, that's pretty time-consuming if you have many of them.

It may be possible to do this faster by copying the list directly from the corresponding v6 configuration file to the v7 one, although I'm not completely sure if that's all that's required.

Won't work, don't try that, please.
I've found a (somewhat involved) solution, but am flabbergasted that the developers didn't even think that it's an issue. People don't use personal libraries?

[delfinom]

KiCAD 7 is not able to integrate my personal libraries, although they have the same names, format, location etc. And there's no function in 7 to fix this.
I have to add each and every personal library manually, which is intolerable.

Yes, you need to re-add every non-standard library manually, that's pretty time-consuming if you have many of them.

It may be possible to do this faster by copying the list directly from the corresponding v6 configuration file to the v7 one, although I'm not completely sure if that's all that's required.

Won't work, don't try that, please.
I've found a (somewhat involved) solution, but am flabbergasted that the developers didn't even think that it's an issue. People don't use personal libraries?

The flip side of the coin is if you start using your old libraries under V7 and end up saving them, it's file format will get upgraded and become incompatible with V6. Meanwhile a user may want to use KiCad 6 and 7 in parallel where they just use KiCad 6 for older designs.

Perhaps it could be made a startup option.

[SiliconWizard]

KiCAD 7 is not able to integrate my personal libraries, although they have the same names, format, location etc. And there's no function in 7 to fix this.
I have to add each and every personal library manually, which is intolerable.

Yes, you need to re-add every non-standard library manually, that's pretty time-consuming if you have many of them.

It may be possible to do this faster by copying the list directly from the corresponding v6 configuration file to the v7 one, although I'm not completely sure if that's all that's required.

Won't work, don't try that, please.
I've found a (somewhat involved) solution, but am flabbergasted that the developers didn't even think that it's an issue. People don't use personal libraries?

The flip side of the coin is if you start using your old libraries under V7 and end up saving them, it's file format will get upgraded and become incompatible with V6. Meanwhile a user may want to use KiCad 6 and 7 in parallel where they just use KiCad 6 for older designs.

Yep, that's what I mentioned earlier. So it's understandable that KiCad v7 doesn't automatically import v6 custom libraries as is - it could make users extremely angry if they need to keep using v6, which is a very likely event as I already said if they have to collaborate with other people/companies that may not have upgraded.

But adding a simple tool to make the import easy in one go, I'm all for it. With all due warnings to the user, and an option to back up custom libraries in some directory so that you don't accidentally lose the ability to use them for v6.

Then again, you should backup your custom libraries on a regular basis anyway and especially before upgrading major versions.

[Benta]

The flip side of the coin is if you start using your old libraries under V7 and end up saving them, it's file format will get upgraded and become incompatible with V6. Meanwhile a user may want to use KiCad 6 and 7 in parallel where they just use KiCad 6 for older designs.

I think you've misunderstood the problem. The issue is not library compatibility. The conversion worked fine from 5.1 to 6.0 (.sym to .kicad_sym), and from 6.0 to 7.0 there's no change in library format. Should it happen in the future, I'm certain that the KiCAD team will take this into account. No worries there.

No, it's simply that the update to 7.0 creates a new index file for the libraries, and there's no way to import the 6.0 custom index list (at least, I haven't found any). That little function would solve everything immediately.
Having to use the "Add library..." function 10, 20, 50, 100... times is tedious, to say the least.
But like I said, I've solved the issue myself.

[Doctorandus_P]

Schematic symbol libraries are listed in the sym-lib-table, and footprint libraries are listed in the fp-lib-table file.

A source code comparison program such as https://meldmerge.org/ works quite nicely here. Use a command such as:

/home/me/.config/kicad$ meld 6.0/sym-lib-table 7.0/sym-lib-table 

Also, if you go this way, I recommend you also put your personal libaries in a separate text file, so it's easier to merge them into the next KiCad verson.

[VEGETA]

I wonder why doesn't kicad have automatic update feature without the need to download new installer and so on

[SiliconWizard]

I wonder why doesn't kicad have automatic update feature without the need to download new installer and so on

It's a much harder task than it seems.
Writing software updaters that correctly take into account going from any version to any other, with a safe update path whatever the user configuration is, is difficult and likely to bring more problems than it solves.
From experience, the updater would trigger more bug tickets than KiCad itself.
So I can understand why they don't make that a priority.

But I guess anyone is free to contribute.

[JohanH]

It's a much harder task than it seems.

Totally agree. I've written Windows Installer (MSI) scripts (also for more complex applications) for two decades and they are a pain. In the Linux world, it's totally different. Windows is this abstraction layer upon abstraction layer where you can do so many things wrong. In the linux world, if your installer doesn't work as the distribution requires, it isn't accepted into the repository (whether it's rpm, deb, flatpak or whatever). So on the Linux side, you can expect that updates will work. Not so much in Windows. I've seen so many broken updates in Windows due to the complexity of the Windows Installer format. You can't demand from regular developers that they master installation and upgrades in Windows (unless we are talking about really simple applications). Sad but true. You can do it in the old way without Windows Installer, but updates are still a pain.

[VEGETA]

but now when going from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1 i will remove old package and install the new one. will this affect my libraries and so on?

[SiliconWizard]

but now when going from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1 i will remove old package and install the new one. will this affect my libraries and so on?

No.
It will update the standard KiCad libraries if you use the installer. But it won't touch your custom libraries and they'll still be available as configured in 7.0.0.

[Doctorandus_P]

KiCad has all it's user configuration files together in a configuration directory. If you are in doubt, then make a copy of that directory. A backup of this directory can be handy for restoring the configuration, using a merge program to check for differences and other "unexpected" things.

If you want to completely reconfigure KiCad, you can also simply delete (or rename) this directory, and then KiCad creates it again and acts like it has been freshly installed and you run it for the first time.

[kermitfrog]

Hard to believe KICAD is up to 7.01....it has sure come a long ways. So grateful to everyone who has made it what it is

[nimish]

Kicad is a usability mess, unfortunately the source is a disaster too.

It took me two days to fix the build to work properly on a Mac without their awful builder hack, and that's before adding any features.

Hopefully I can fix their build process so adding these basic tweaks is straightforward. It ain't hard to do, it's just that the existing process is awful.

[SiliconWizard]

Really? You sound angry.

I don't know about MacOS, but I have no difficulties building KiCad from source, both on Linux and on Windows. Even using MSYS2 on Windows, which the KiCad team has seemingly deprecated, but it can still be done.

Maybe you can report your build issues on the KiCad forum: https://forum.kicad.info/

Out of curiosity (I don't use MacOS currently), can you tell us what kind of hack is required? You said too little or too much.

[shapirus]

For the lack of a better place to ask, I'll use this thread: can KiCAD do interactive simulation? Such as e.g. Proteus, where you can build a ciruit, hit a "play" button and watch how the probe measurements change in (quasi) real time, use virtual oscilloscope, push buttons and toggle switches interactively, etc.

I tried it once in the past but couldn't find anything for interactive simulation. Maybe I overlooked something obvious.

Proteus works, but it's not Linux-native, so I have to use wine, and a pirated copy as well, which sucks. I'd much prefer something  that's FOSS and Linux-native, if it's at all available.

[nimish]

Really? You sound angry.

I don't know about MacOS, but I have no difficulties building KiCad from source, both on Linux and on Windows. Even using MSYS2 on Windows, which the KiCad team has seemingly deprecated, but it can still be done.

Maybe you can report your build issues on the KiCad forum: https://forum.kicad.info/

Out of curiosity (I don't use MacOS currently), can you tell us what kind of hack is required? You said too little or too much.

On a Mac, you need `kicad-mac-builder`, a whole separate repo of cmake scripts. They have their own issues.

They also are unnecessary if the core kicad build scripts were maintained properly. Even for at-the-time cmake, which admittedly sucked hard, they aren't using best practices.

I'm upstreaming my fixes to the build as I modularize them. I've lost enough time to weird Kicad quirks.

[John B]

Are there any hints about when a stable version is being released on Fedora? I'm weighing up whether I should uninstall the native install and go with a flatpak from now on, as flatpak seems to be a prioritised release format with a few software packages I've seen.

[SiliconWizard]

Really? You sound angry.

I don't know about MacOS, but I have no difficulties building KiCad from source, both on Linux and on Windows. Even using MSYS2 on Windows, which the KiCad team has seemingly deprecated, but it can still be done.

Maybe you can report your build issues on the KiCad forum: https://forum.kicad.info/

Out of curiosity (I don't use MacOS currently), can you tell us what kind of hack is required? You said too little or too much.

On a Mac, you need `kicad-mac-builder`, a whole separate repo of cmake scripts. They have their own issues.

They also are unnecessary if the core kicad build scripts were maintained properly. Even for at-the-time cmake, which admittedly sucked hard, they aren't using best practices.

I'm upstreaming my fixes to the build as I modularize them. I've lost enough time to weird Kicad quirks.

Ok, I see. I really haven't looked into the Mac build thing.
I can confirm the cmake stuff is not all that great though for all platforms.

[JohanH]

Are there any hints about when a stable version is being released on Fedora? I'm weighing up whether I should uninstall the native install and go with a flatpak from now on, as flatpak seems to be a prioritised release format with a few software packages I've seen.

My understanding is that 7.x will be part of next Fedora release (38) in late April. It's policy with a few exceptions to not update software major versions during a Fedora version life cycle. So major releases often end up in next version of Fedora.

I've been using a copr repository for now. Be aware that it's not official (but I'm quite sure it's the package from this repo that use to end up in official releases). https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/kicad/kicad/

Otherwise the flatpak is the alternative.