Package: release.debian.org Severity: normal User: release.debian....@packages.debian.org Usertags: unblock
Please unblock package kicad The KiCad binary packages based on upstream 5.0.2 (the current version in testing from December 2018) are build with GTK2+ bindings which has now some important downsides for the usability of KiCad. The upstream developers are aware of this and have worked on pushing the KiCad applications to work and use GTK3+ bindings. They released the new version 5.1.0 about two weeks ago which addresses also a move over to provide a Python3 library and dropping the old Python2 library instead. Furthermore some additional possible UI stuff mainly provided by external extension, that are based on wxWidgets and wxPython4, aren't working with the version from testing due the GTK3+ binding in the wxWidgets libaries. And as usual a lot of small bug fixes did happen between the two released versions. The binary packages from src:kicad have no reverse dependencies nor providing any public library (besides the Python3 library) so there are no problems to be expected by the update at least I don't now any of them. In the past I've provided snapshots of the ongoing development including release candidates of 5.1.0 in experimental and based on the feedback from the KiCad forum and community no big issues nor packaging problem got reported so I finally uploaded the 5.1.0 release to unstable. Also here since the upload no new bug reports nor issues in forum got reported, in contrary people start asking then KiCad 5.1.0 will be available in testing and finally in the Buster release. :) In all the reported issues against KiCad are really just a few, currently we have 5 reports. The resulting full debdiff between 5.0.2 from testing and 5.1.0 is rather big due a natural lot of changes within the upstream source. I uploaded a compressed version of the (full) debdiff to p.d.o. https://people.debian.org/~tijuca/unblock/kicad-full.debdiff.tar.xz The probably more interesting things are the differences within the debian folder. I created a dedicated diff on this that is also available on p.d.o as I'm not sure it the list will accept the plain file due size limitations. https://people.debian.org/~tijuca/unblock/kicad.debian-folder.debdiff To summarize the Debian specific changes here: * Adopt the build dependencies so the build is using wxWidgest GTK3+ based packages. * Adjust a dedicated (binary) package dependency to use python-wxgtk3.0 which is linked against wxgtk3.0 with GTK3+ symbols, needed for the internal KiCad scripting interface. * Use Clang instead of GCC as compiler as the required GLM library >= 0.9.9.3 uses the C++ standard in it's "own" way which Clang is able to work with, GCC7 is not. * The Dutch documentation got dropped as not updated since at least on release cycle. * Upstream is providing a lot more of documentation in 5.1.0 which are finally packaged in kicad-doc-{en,it,ru,zh}, no new binary packages. * As usual a lot of updates to d/copyright due the changes happen to the source. * The build of the documentation of the final 5.1.0 needs a workaround as the cmake system otherwise is puzzled and breaks a successful build. (Since my package upload the root for this issue got identified and will get fixed in future upstream updates.) unblock kicad/5.1.0+dfsg1-1 -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/6 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled