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KiCad 10.0.6 Baseline

Reviewed: 2026-09-04

KiCad MCP Pro treats KiCad 10.0.6 as the last verified compatible KiCad 10 baseline, not the newest upstream stable patch. The repository compatibility matrix records this tested baseline in kicad.latestVerified and kicad10FeatureParity.baseline.

Upstream status as of 2026-10-09: KiCad 10.0.7 stable was released on 2026-10-07. It is not yet promoted by this project. A compatibility promotion requires successful version-pinned native canaries covering ERC/DRC, BOM/netlist and manufacturing exports, PCM/IPC and applicable platform regressions. Do not change latestVerified based only on the upstream release announcement.

Legacy Ubuntu 22.04 exception and candidate 10.0.7 evidence

The ubuntu-22.04 jobs in .github/workflows/kicad-live-e2e.yml and .github/workflows/dev-bootstrap.yml still explicitly require 10.0.6. This is a legacy platform exception, not an assertion that Ubuntu 22.04 has passed the 10.0.7 qualification. A tested attempt to build the official 10.0.7 Jammy PPA encountered a libgit2 git_packbuilder_name compatibility blocker; do not silently remove these jobs or relax their exact-version tests. The separately qualified Ubuntu 24.04 10.0.7 lane is not interchangeable with Ubuntu 22.04. See the 10.0.7 patch parity and platform audit.

On hosted Windows, the signed fixed-SHA-256 official 10.0.7 installer has been exercised by an automatic main-push native run (32/32 native steps, 5/5 semantic comparisons); the community Chocolatey KiCad package was listed at 10.0.6 on 2026-10-12. The new Windows runner is an extra post-merge and weekly signal, not a new required PR context or a general version promotion. The real Windows GUI/IPC qualification remains explicitly operator-dispatched.

Release Impact

KiCad 10.0.6 was released on 2026-08-29 as a 10.0-series bugfix release. At that review, the kicad/kicad-10.0-releases PPA served 10.0.6 exclusively; the prior 10.0.5 package is no longer installable from it, which is why this promotion was required rather than optional. The MCP surface most at risk from patch drift remains the headless CLI path: ERC/DRC JSON reports, PCB export artifacts, importer capability help text, and manufacturing release formats. The 10.0.6 changelog documents Allegro-import bug fixes (reference-field collision avoidance, netlist room-name sanitization) on the GUI import path; it does not claim new kicad-cli pcb import --format allegro CLI support, so the Allegro CLI import surface remains blocked pending fresh capability-probe evidence from the required canary.

Notable 10.0.6 Changes Relevant to This Product

Full changelog reviewed against the current tool surface. Most entries are upstream-only fixes this product inherits automatically through kicad-cli with no code change required; a few are worth recording explicitly:

  • CLI: "Used per-variant field values in multi-variant BOM export" (#24936). Directly affects export/bom.py's --variant handling behind export_bom(). Previously-incorrect multi-variant BOM field values are now fixed upstream. A 2026-09-04 probe against KiCad's upstream 10.0.6 QA variant fixture confirmed R1=10K_V1 for Variant 1 and R1=10K_V2 for Variant2 on the installed 10.0.6 CLI. The repository canary currently checks generic BOM export but does not assert these variant-specific values; dedicated hermetic semantic coverage is tracked in #843.
  • PCB Editor: three Specctra DSN export fixes (double-quoted field escaping #24946, duplicate/empty footprint references #24947, layer-name quoting #24948). Directly improves route_export_dsn() (tools/routing.py) output correctness for FreeRouting hand-off — no code change needed, this is a pure quality improvement inherited from the CLI.
  • PCB Editor / 3D Viewer: IPC-2581 export fixes, including a crash fix for boards with no outline and new "Report warnings on IPC-2581 export" (#25149, several sub-fixes). Relevant to export_ipc2581. The product now preserves successful-export diagnostics from KiCad 10.0.6 and surfaces them to the caller under a Warnings: section instead of silently discarding stderr.
  • PCB Editor: Gerber X3 DNP/BOM-exclude honoring (#25010) and drill report back-drilled hole counting + back-drill filename layer fix (#25021, #23452). Improve export_gerber()/export_drill() output correctness automatically; no code change needed.
  • IPC API: expanded stackup parameters (#24182), plus a new parent field on board types and a new flip-board-item command. Potentially relevant to pcb_get_stackup/pcb_set_stackup and the native-live transaction surface (pcb/transaction_lifecycle.py), but these are new upstream capabilities, not fixes to existing behavior — evaluating whether to consume them is a separate, deliberate feature decision, not part of this baseline promotion.

Required Canary Evidence

scripts/kicad_canary.py is the required 10.0.6 drift gate. The primary lane fails when the installed CLI does not match the configured 10.0.x range or when any required artifact is missing.

The 10.0.6 canary covers:

  • ERC JSON and DRC JSON reports for clean and violation fixtures.
  • Gerber, drill, IPC-2581, STEP, PDF/SVG/DXF, BOM, netlist, and board-stat artifacts.
  • Importer capability probes for PADS and Allegro.
  • Path-with-spaces, Unicode path, and read-only output handling.

Carried-Forward Fixture

The kicad-10-0-3-regressions fixture remains intentionally named for its original patch release. It is a regression corpus carried forward under the 10.0.6 baseline, not a statement that the primary tested KiCad version is still 10.0.3.

Platform Verification Status

The required Ubuntu canary installs the final 10.0.6 package from the stable KiCad 10.0 PPA and rejects any other patch version. Windows remains represented by the required 10.0.6 canary lane; final physical-host evidence is tracked in issue #427.