Kicad does not find ngspice shared library

[Kreijstal]

Description / Steps to reproduce the issue

install ngspice and kicad with pacman or pacboy. Open kicad, create new project. Put some spice elements in schematic view. 3-2024-01-05_145924.zip Try to use simulation, kicad will not find the ngspice shared library

Expected behavior

Simulation should work, or it should find ngspice shared library

Actual behavior

Simulation library is not found

Verification

• [X] I have verified that my MSYS2 is up-to-date before submitting the report (see https://www.msys2.org/docs/updating/)

Windows Version

MINGW64_NT-6.3-9600

MINGW environments affected

• [X] MINGW64
• [ ] MINGW32
• [ ] UCRT64
• [ ] CLANG64
• [ ] CLANG32
• [ ] CLANGARM64

Are you willing to submit a PR?

I don't know what the problem is

[Biswa96]

Open kicad, create new project. Put some spice elements in schematic view.

Please explain those steps and how the attached file is used after those steps.

[Kreijstal]

Open kicad, create new project. Put some spice elements in schematic view.

Please explain those steps and how the attached file is used after those steps.

it is an example file of me creating some components

[Biswa96]

Do you mean to open the project/directory in kicad after extracting the zip file?

[Kreijstal]

I think the zip file is a misunderstanding, it is just an example in case tester was too lazy to create anything in schematics interface, it is unrelated to the bug, just click on

and you receive an error, when kicad is installed through pacman, steps are

• create new project, you can name it test or whatever
• open schematic
• click simulate button error

tried with a recent installation of msys2 on another computer running windows 10, I can reproduce this on 2 machines now

[Kreijstal]

I installed kicad through scoop, to see what is wrong..

scoop's kicad provides ngspice.dll which msys does not seem to provide.

The kicad installed from scoop does not suffer from this problem, it can open the simulator without problems

[Kreijstal]

okay, so I did something weird, I copy this ngspice.dll into /mingw64/bin directory, and it did not error anymore, but it crashed with a segfault, so... there is something going on. :)

[Kreijstal]

There is ngspice documentation about ngspice.dll

Okay, I copied libngspice0.dll into ngspice.dll, and it worked!

[Biswa96]

Thanks for the info. I can reproduce the issue in my setup. kicad is probably loading ngspice shared library with LoadLibrary and can not find it.

eeschema/sim/ngspice.cpp:        m_dll.Load( wxDynamicLibrary::CanonicalizeName( "ngspice" ) );

[Kreijstal]

I guess I would see what is the most common naming notation, and either make a copy of ngspice.dll for kicad or patch kicad so it looks for either libngspice0.dll or ngspice.dll or upstream?

[MehdiChinoune]

https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/blob/7.0.10/cmake/Findngspice.cmake?ref_type=tags#L105 Is valid only when using MSYS Makefiles, probably should changed to if (MINGW). https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/blob/7.0.10/eeschema/CMakeLists.txt#L19

[Kreijstal]

I guess it is a problem wit wxWidgets name resolution?

[Biswa96]

I guess it is a problem wit wxWidgets name resolution?

Yeah, something like that. The DLL name is set by the CMake file. MehdiChinoune's suggestion may solve the issue.

[MehdiChinoune]

@Kreijstal I have pushed an update for kicad to 7.0.10, It includes a fix for your issue. Could update it from staging repo https://packages.msys2.org/queue and confirm.

[Biswa96]

I have downloaded the kicad 7.0.10 package from staging and verified that 02cf7e7dc77ca15758ec83e6e7ea3fc4672995a8 commit fixes the kicad issue. Thank you.

[Biswa96]

The new kicad package has been added in pacman repository. Please update the packages with pacman -Syu command.

[Kreijstal]

@Kreijstal I have pushed an update for kicad to 7.0.10, It includes a fix for your issue. Could update it from staging repo https://packages.msys2.org/queue and confirm.

Yeah it fixed it thank you