Comment 18 for bug 1752150

Wayne

Thanks for the encouragement. My hope is that at least if I can build and trivially modify KiCad interaction with developers will be more productive for them, especially given my modest expertise. Similarly, it will be easier for me to follow the road map if I have a clue to begin with.

Renumbering has three major components: parsing the PCB and schematics (not as trivial as you'd imagine given the potential for a hierarchy), creating a change plan, and implementing that change plan on the respective files (PCB, schematics, and netlist), basically back-annotation. I suspect that whatever changes are made to the file structures to enable pin-swapping will most like impact the third component, namely back-annotation.

I did make a "feature request" and was hopeful somebody would reach out to me. When that didn't happen I figured I'd move it along myself a bit farther.

That said, I'm not trying to wag the dog. I'm sure the devs are very competent and I don't want to waste their time because I know what it is like to have to deal with a complete newb like me asking questions all the time. That said I will review the roadmap.

I am exclusively using msys64 but the build seems to combine both, though I'm not sure why. My skills on things like cmake are negligible so I am very hesitant to try and parse it.

I do not understand what this means

" I would avoid building and installing a binary package. There is no need to install the libraries and docs everytime you want to make a change and rebuild kicad. Building kicad itself takes long enough on windows. The overhead of the libraries will make this process really painful."

Except to say that yes, I'd very much like to know how to build *only* PCBnew, at least for the moment. I just don't have a clue how to start.

Since I only found instructions on how to build all of Kicad I figured I'd start with that. Once I did that I could pare it down. If there is a shortcut to only building PCBnew I'd be deliriously happy.

-----Original Message-----
From: <email address hidden> <email address hidden> On Behalf Of Wayne Stambaugh
Sent: March 7, 2018 1:03 PM
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: [Bug 1752150] Re: Build from source MSYS2 the Easy Way Fails

@Brian,

I think your back-annotation tool would be a useful tool for users. As Jon mentioned. Please keep in mind back annotation for pin and gate swapping in being planned for v6. I'm sure this will dovetail in with the work that you are doing so it is important to communicate with the development team what you are working on to prevent duplication of effort and merge conflicts. I cannot stress this enough. We have had too many developers write large pieces of code that could not be used because it didn't fit into what other developers were working on. That is why we have a road map. You should look there first. As always, if you are not sure, ask.

As for msys2 build issues. I was incorrect about oce and ngspice not being packaged. They actually are packaged and can be installed using pacman. Will try to do a better job of keeping the windows build instructions up to date. FYI, there is a known issue (see the link Jon
provided) in 32-bit builds so I recommend you use 64-bit (x86_64) builds of kicad or you will have to fix a broken path in some of the build.make files in your kicad binary path. Since it sounds like you are going to be hacking on kicad, I would avoid building and installing a binary package. There is no need to install the libraries and docs everytime you want to make a change and rebuild kicad. Building kicad itself takes long enough on windows. The overhead of the libraries will make this process really painful.

Cheers,

Wayne