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 <anthonypark6...@gmail.com> 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! > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "KiCad Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to devlist+unsubscr...@kicad.org. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/4d6cd16a-5373-40e0-a07a-e3a31676b7ben%40kicad.org > <https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/4d6cd16a-5373-40e0-a07a-e3a31676b7ben%40kicad.org?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devlist+unsubscr...@kicad.org. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/CA%2BqGbCCBMDCJdHPQprnnpW8pPrJLyr%2B2o-4bkBmEP%2BMN4WanRw%40mail.gmail.com.
