ngspice now mandatory build dependency

[Ian McInerney]

I have just pushed a commit to the master branch (version 7.99) that makes ngspice a required dependency for building KiCad, this means the previous compile option of KICAD_SPICE is now never used (so it can be removed from any build scripts/packaging scripts), and you will need to have the ngspice shared library installed to build KiCad.

This was done since the simulator/spice integration part of KiCad has seen a lot of development recently, and it is becoming a larger feature of the schematic editor. Additionally, it turns out the build with spice disabled (using KICAD_SPICE=OFF) was actually broken and wouldn't link eeschema properly due to missing symbol definitions - so I don't foresee this change breaking any existing build scripts people may have.

-Ian

[Steve Falco]

I'll change the fedora nightlies to match.  I cannot update the downstream packages until we spin a 7.0.2 with your changes.

[Ian McInerney]

Thanks for updating the nightlies. Just to clarify though, this change will not be backported to v7, so you should keep the flag for the downstream v7 packages until you rebase to v8 when it is released.

-Ian

[Steven A. Falco]

Thanks for the clarification. I'll leave the downstream as is until v8.

Steve

On 3/20/23 01:44 PM, Ian McInerney wrote:
> Thanks for updating the nightlies. Just to clarify though, this change will not be backported to v7, so you should keep the flag for the downstream v7 packages until you rebase to v8 when it is released.
>
> -Ian
>

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 5:40 PM Steve Falco <steve...@gmail.com <mailto:steve...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
> I'll change the fedora nightlies to match.  I cannot update the downstream packages until we spin a 7.0.2 with your changes.