KiCad 6.99/7 dependency bumps

[Seth Hillbrand]

Hi Folks-

After some discussions, the lead dev team has decided to bump the minimum versions for a couple of packages needed to build KiCad.

1. CMake - The minimum required version of CMake for KiCad master branch is now 3.21.  This change was made to support an iterative build feature from https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/1406 .  This will allow the KiCad developers to spend less time building the code while developing new features.

2. wxWidgets - We are increasing the minimum supported version of wxWidgets for KiCad from 3.0 to 3.1.5 (the oldest version on a supported Linux distribution) with the expectation that we will increase to 3.2 once our support for Fedora 36 ceases in May 2023.

What does (2) mean?

This means that KiCad is developed and tested against wxWidgets 3.2. The KiCad team will not perform testing or bug fixing against older versions of wxWidgets, and may inadvertently introduce changes that break compilation or function when building against older versions. We welcome patches to fix build issues against earlier versions of wxWidgets as long as these patches do not change functionality when compiling against more modern versions. These patches should be the minimum necessary to get KiCad working, rather than attempting to backport functionality from the newer wxWidgets API (unless doing so is trivial).

Our Windows and Mac builds have been running wx3.2 for many months at this point.  We expect to continue to develop KiCad to take advantage of new wx features that have been introduced since wx3.0.  Many of these help KiCad to run better, faster and more reliably on more systems.

Thanks as always-

Seth

--

Seth Hillbrand

Lead Developer

+1-530-302-5483‬

Long Beach, CA

www.kipro-pcb.com    in...@kipro-pcb.com

[Levente]

Hi Seth,


These are bad news for Debian stable users. But yeah... we have to move on.

On 12/17/22 01:54, Seth Hillbrand wrote:
> Hi Folks-
>
> After some discussions, the lead dev team has decided to bump the
> minimum versions for a couple of packages needed to build KiCad.
>
> 1. CMake - The minimum required version of CMake for KiCad master branch
> is now 3.21.  This change was made to support an iterative build feature
> from https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/1406
> <https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/1406> .  This will
> allow the KiCad developers to spend less time building the code while
> developing new features.
>
> 2. wxWidgets - We are increasing the minimum supported version of
> wxWidgets for KiCad from 3.0 to 3.1.5 (the oldest version on a supported
> Linux distribution) with the expectation that we will increase to 3.2
> once our support for Fedora 36 ceases in May 2023.

--
Levente Kovacs
Senior Electronic Engineer

W: http://levente.logonex.eu

[Steven A. Falco]

Fedora 36 / 37 will stay on the 6.0 series unless a CVE forces us to do an upgrade to KiCad 7, so I don't foresee any issues for the production builds.

The nightlies could possibly be affected, but I'd guess that anyone testing nightlies could upgrade to F37 or Rawhide without too much trouble. So even if we had to drop the nightlies on F36 prior to May 2023 the impact would likely be minimal.

Steve

On 12/16/22 07:54 PM, Seth Hillbrand wrote:
> Hi Folks-
>
> After some discussions, the lead dev team has decided to bump the minimum versions for a couple of packages needed to build KiCad.
>

> 1. CMake - The minimum required version of CMake for KiCad master branch is now 3.21.  This change was made to support an iterative build feature from https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/1406 <https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/1406> .  This will allow the KiCad developers to spend less time building the code while developing new features.

>
> 2. wxWidgets - We are increasing the minimum supported version of wxWidgets for KiCad from 3.0 to 3.1.5 (the oldest version on a supported Linux distribution) with the expectation that we will increase to 3.2 once our support for Fedora 36 ceases in May 2023.
>
> What does (2) mean?
> This means that KiCad is developed and tested against wxWidgets 3.2. The KiCad team will not perform testing or bug fixing against older versions of wxWidgets, and may inadvertently introduce changes that break compilation or function when building against older versions. We welcome patches to fix build issues against earlier versions of wxWidgets as long as these patches do not change functionality when compiling against more modern versions. These patches should be the minimum necessary to get KiCad working, rather than attempting to backport functionality from the newer wxWidgets API (unless doing so is trivial).
>
> Our Windows and Mac builds have been running wx3.2 for many months at this point.  We expect to continue to develop KiCad to take advantage of new wx features that have been introduced since wx3.0.  Many of these help KiCad to run better, faster and more reliably on more systems.
>
> Thanks as always-
> Seth
>
> --

> KiCad Services Corporation Logo
> Seth Hillbrand

> *Lead Developer*
> +1-530-302-5483‬
> Long Beach, CA
> www.kipro-pcb.com <https://www.kipro-pcb.com/> in...@kipro-pcb.com <mailto:in...@kipro-pcb.com>
>
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[Stefan Brüns]

I think for distributions just doing pristine builds for packaging, the CMake dependency can be reduced to something lower without any bad side effects. Just tried it with CMake 3.20 and the build went fine.

Regards, Stefan

[Levente]

I installed cmake from backports, and it compiles fine.