Skip to content

macOS desktop release ships without helpers, so KiCad IPC never starts #510

Closed

Description

@edsammy

On the v0.13.0 darwin-arm64 desktop release, every KiCad IPC call fails:

KiCad IPC unavailable: the headless KiCad for <project> did not say it was listening within 30 s.

Cause: the macOS release ships no helpers. backplane-kipc, -step2glb, -voice and -browser are missing from the app's backplane-service folder and from the top of the release. The hub falls back to backplane-kipc on PATH, nothing spawns, and KServe.late reports the timeout. KiCad isn't at fault: kipc's socket polling handles bp.6's buffered stdout. 2655df8 fixes where the desktop hub looks for helpers, but on macOS there is nothing to find.

The same gap breaks Mech-tab previews of STEP parts that aren't cached yet (backplane-step2glb not found).

Workaround: put backplane-kipc on the hub's PATH (for example, link a dev build into ~/.local/bin), then restart the hub. ⌘Q leaves the resident hub running, so it has to be killed. IPC then reports ready with KiCad 10.99.0-bp.6.

Suggested fix:

  • Stage the macOS helpers into the service payload the way build-windows-helpers.sh / prepare-windows-helpers.py do for Windows.
  • Make the release producer reject a target that's missing a helper.
  • Report "helper not found" instead of the KiCad timeout.

Environment: Backplane 0.13.0 (371f6d3), KiCad 10.99.0-bp.6 (8e4447d), macOS 26 arm64.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions