Translation(s): English
KiCad Suite is an Open Source Electronics Design Automation Suite for various platforms. It allows you to do the complete development process of creating schematics, BOM lists and finally design a PCB within one suite.
KiCad is maintained in the PKG Electronics Teams, feel free to join the team and helping out by maintaining the KiCad related packages! If you can help out with translations for KiCad or the manuals and HowTo's please take a look into the upstream repositories on GitHub for kicad-i18n and kicad-doc.
This page is right now just a mindset for things to be done to handle the upcoming version 5 of KiCad. This version was targeted for the end of year 2017. As this date is history a release will be probably made in spring 2018.
ToDo's for KiCad 5
ngspice is needed for schematic simulation (see also KiCad/ngspice for details)
- split of the libraries part into separate source packages
- kicad-symbols, libraries for schematic symbols (*.lib and *.dcm files)
- kicad-footprints, libraries for footprint symbols (*.pretty folders)
- kicad-packages3d, libraries for 3d-models (*.wings and *.wrl files)
- create kicad-templates Project templates for popular hardware like Raspberry-PI, Arduino, etc. (basically these are own projects you can base on), probably not worth to create a own source package.
- drop kicad-common package, transition to meta package kicad-libraries that is depending on the three binary packages from above
- rework the process of creating the various source packages?
- update of package kicad, make kicad-libraries a virtual package that is providing kicad-common
- also split of the demo project files into a own package kicad-demos
Current state
Right now only the new planned kicad source packages existing. The long term plan is to do a collaboration with Jean-Samuel Reynaud who is doing the work for the Daily-Build PPA in Ubuntu. We want to get the same package layout within Debian and Ubuntu.
The following new source package are planned.
src:package |
ITP |
VCS on Salsa |
State |
uploaded to experimental |
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uploaded to experimental |
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uploaded to experimental |
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uploaded to experimental |
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ngspice-dfsg |
WIP, currently as local tree only |
The update of src:kicad hasn't started yet as we first need the recommended (new) packages.
Changed package dependencies for KiCad 5
In the past it turned out the kicad-common package isn't flexible enough to provide easy updates for the users on the typical libraries like the schematic symbols and also the libraries of the footprints. Not that often but but more often than KiCad point releases happen to the project templates for KiCad. So we made the decision to let the old package kicad-common become a transitional package and split it of into more new source packages. The old package kicad-common needs of course a package that will provide the dependencies. We will create a new virtual package that is depending on the most needed libraries. These are kicad-symbols, kicad-footprints and kicad-templates. The previous within kicad-common shipped 3D models will get also their own binary package witch has just a suggests due the big size (currently about 3,6GB of installed files) in the kicad package. The following graphic is showing the planned dependencies.