Thank you for your reply, John.

So for debugging the PCB editor, would it be okay to understand that I can 
just run make pcbnew in the build folder, set up the environment variables, 
and then debug it as a standalone application?

2025년 6월 9일 월요일 오후 9시 59분 29초 UTC+9에 [email protected]님이 작성:

> Hi Anthony,
>
> In general, build.py is only used for initial setup of the required 
> dependencies, and in CI to automatically build the whole installation 
> image. Developers usually don't need to build the whole image to just test 
> a part of KiCad.
>
> When you touch a file, running make for the target in question should just 
> rebuild that target, not a full rebuild. It sounds like something is off 
> with your make command if that is triggering a full rebuild, but I haven't 
> seen that before.
>
> There is no need to re-make the kicad.app bundle just for testing changes 
> to pcbnew. You can run the PCB editor standalone by setting the right 
> environment variables (e.g. KICAD_RUN_FROM_BUILD_DIR).
>
> I also recommend using Ninja instead of make as described at 
> https://dev-docs.kicad.org/en/build/macos/index.html but this should not 
> be related to your described problem. 
>
> -Jon
>
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2025, 04:33 Anthony Park <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I'm new to C++ projects and spending a lot of time on builds. I have a 
>> question about incremental builds on Mac.
>>
>> When I modify a single file in pcbnew and want to apply only that change, 
>> what command should I run?
>>
>> Currently I'm facing these issues:
>>
>>    - Running build.py from kicad-mac-builder doesn't seem to apply my 
>>    changes 
>>    - Running make kicad in the build folder starts a full rebuild from 
>>    scratch, taking over an hour 
>>
>> I'm trying to work around this by:
>>
>>    1. Running make pcbnew and make install directly in 
>>    build/src/kicad-build/ 
>>    2. Re-bundling pcbnew.app 
>>    3. Re-integrating it into the main kicad.app bundle 
>>
>> Is this the right workflow for incremental development, or is there a 
>> better approach for faster iteration when making small changes to pcbnew?
>>
>> Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, as the long build times are 
>> really slowing down my development process.
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>>
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