Kicad on Mac OSX 11?

[fastguido]

Is anyone able to get Kicad to work on Big Sur OSX11? I can get the Kicad folder to download to the application folder, but it won't download to the application support folder. If I open the program, it is looking for some type of global library folder. I have to force quit the program to get out of it. I tried to drag to the application folder which it did download, but still doesn't work.

[Doctorandus_P]

https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-on-osx-11-big-sur/26121/2

[fastguido]

That's me posting, and still won't work.

[nfmax]

Just to check, when the installation disk image mounts, are you failing to copy the the Kicad app itself to the Application directory, or the Kicad application support files to the Application Support directory? If the latter, what you have to do is to open the Application Support link in a Finder window, and copy the Kicad application support files to that: you will be prompted for your password. Since Catalina, you can't drag & drop to a link to a 'protected' directory. Fair enough, but Finder doesn't tell you that it hasn't done the copy, or what to do about it, which is bad.

[_joost_]

Yes, i am running KiCAD 5.18 on big sur just fine. Sounds like you need to set your library references.

[fastguido]

Just to check, when the installation disk image mounts, are you failing to copy the the Kicad app itself to the Application directory, or the Kicad application support files to the Application Support directory? If the latter, what you have to do is to open the Application Support link in a Finder window, and copy the Kicad application support files to that: you will be prompted for your password. Since Catalina, you can't drag & drop to a link to a 'protected' directory. Fair enough, but Finder doesn't tell you that it hasn't done the copy, or what to do about it, which is bad.

Yes, the latter function, just the kicad icon just springs back, won't download. Thanks for that info on how to manually do that, Yes pretty lame on the user function with no explanation on what to do. It is if the developers never downloaded kicad on the later OSX's.

[fastguido]

Yes, i am running KiCAD 5.18 on big sur just fine. Sounds like you need to set your library references.

IMHO, I shouldn't have to set up the library, that part of application support files which won't download by their instruction of dragging the icon to the application support folder.

[nfmax]

Just to check, when the installation disk image mounts, are you failing to copy the the Kicad app itself to the Application directory, or the Kicad application support files to the Application Support directory? If the latter, what you have to do is to open the Application Support link in a Finder window, and copy the Kicad application support files to that: you will be prompted for your password. Since Catalina, you can't drag & drop to a link to a 'protected' directory. Fair enough, but Finder doesn't tell you that it hasn't done the copy, or what to do about it, which is bad.

Yes, the latter function, just the kicad icon just springs back, won't download. Thanks for that info on how to manually do that, Yes pretty lame on the user function with no explanation on what to do. It is if the developers never downloaded kicad on the later OSX's.

The problem is the developers do the copying like this all the time and it becomes 'invisible' to them that it needs to be explained to new users. Really, KiCad could do with a proper .DMG installer. And a general purge to ensure it is always called 'KiCad' in its menus and elsewhere, not a mixture with 'kicad' and 'Kicad' in different places.

There is also the issue that plug-ins (e.g. BOM generation) are accessed when being run via some sort of symbolic link directory with a GUID name that MacOs keeps changing. You have to keep deleting and re-installing them, or they stop working after a couple of days. Fortunately they don't disappear from the list in the install dialog, because that is generated from the real directory where the files live. This needs to be fixed!

[bson]

You mean a PKG installer.  That's fairly straightforward, but I'm not sure of how much value it is to technical users.  A much bigger problem is that at least the last time I checked it couldn't be built using anything more recent than the 10.14 SDK, which hasn't been available from Apple for quite some time.  This means unless you have and keep a very old system with an old version of XCode, specifically only to build KiCad you won't be building it.  It relies on undocumented framework components that were removed in the 10.15 SDK.  (Or maybe it's 10.13 it needs?  Or 10.12?  I forget, it has been a year or so.)  It's IMO a bit amateurish to rely on components installed on the developer's system, typically all the prerequisite tools - compilers, SDKs, libraries, linkers, packagers, scripts, etc - is all in a single blob downloaded, prebuilt and used as binaries.  (Though often the source is also included, for reference.)  Otherwise with a large number of developers you will constantly run into problems with different tool versions, different build options, configure parameters, etc.  This configuration management is usually the responsibility of one or more of the developers, and it doesn't get updated every time some component has a new minor version.  When updated everything is updated, and whoever has that task then spends the next week sorting out all the mysterious problems and making sure the product builds get comprehensive exposure and soaking. So usually this is only done at the beginning of a product cycle, except for very minor fixes (bugs encountered without workarounds and security releases) when there's plenty of time find and resolve build related problems.