My main concern is, whether the new 6th version of KiCAD can: a) SELECT MULTIPLE OBJECTS and CHANGE a COMMON PROPERTY (like a text size, via diameter, trace width, etc.). It does cost a non-trivial amount of resources to maintain. Another case in the point - Qt toolkit developers TrollTech have recently announced that their LTS versions will be available only to paying clients. And even the Ubuntu LTS versions are supported only for 5 years from the date of first release. KiCAD isn't something like Ubuntu where there is a corporate sponsor with a millionaire owner behind it financing it and where the long term support is needed because you can't change your server OS every 3 years. ) is not mature "as other established open source software" and needs an LTS version? Seriously? What for, exactly? And if you still do need one (even though you can always keep an installer of an old version around - it is not like an OS which if you use an old version you could get instantly hacked) - are you willing to pay for it? Maintaining an old version of the software costs developer time and money. Kicad 4 series started in 2015, Kicad 5 in 2018. You mean a software that has been around for over 30 years (not kidding - KiCAD was started in 1992) and has a major and still backwards compatible release only every 2-3 years (e.g. Anyone knows for sure if the netlist import in PCBnew will still be supported in v6? But I was still concerned that they would now have little incentive to maintain the netlist import feature, and that in time, it might become not up-to-date and eventually would disappear. Some people on the forum assured me they would just make the schematic -> PCB more "seamless" (still not completely sure what they really added in v6), but that they wouldn't remove the "netlist import" feature in PCBnew. I remember it was discussed on the Kicad forum last year - particularly, I was making the point that netlist -> PCB was a useful feature for people willing to use the PCB editor without using the schematic editor (I was working on a schematic-less design tool that would export to a Kicad netlist). I suspect the change is that now they are using some kind of internal data instead of netlists, or something. I think behind the scene, they were still using netlists. I'm not quite sure yet how far they have gone with this "change".
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