kicad-makefile VS mxe

I found KiBot configuration a bit overwhelming and with the addition of the ‘kicad-cli’ tool in KiCad 7 made a Makefile based runner: https://github.com/tuna-f1sh/kicad-makefile

It allows for a build that is closer to the vanilla KiCad GUI experience and can be built locally with the normal install using ‘make’ - something I wanted.

The first thing of thought of with kicad-cli is a Makefile include. It's developed into kicad-makefile. It does everything I want, except DRC/ERC but hopefully that will come. Perhaps others on here will find it useful and can contribute. See the README for info on how to use it and integrate with GitHub actions.

Cross compiler 64bit minGW along with MXE environment

I used to use MXE [1] to compile fully static Windows binaries on Linux VMs hosted with Travis. It needed to crane in everything though, so it was a source of bottlenecks from time to time. I was also uncertain about the provenance of a lot of the dependencies in that toolchain. So when Travis died I took the opportunity to move Windows builds back to gnu with msys2, all over GH Actions. These are actually comparatively snappy and I’m reasonably satisfied with it.

[1] https://mxe.cc/

MXE readily supports GCC 12 as a plugin (just a configuration line): https://github.com/mxe/mxe/tree/master/plugins/gcc12

Also, if you don't have any other significant dependencies, getting the development tools on Windows is not that hard with the Qt installer. Alternatively, there is MXE.

MXE (https://mxe.cc/) is a great cross compiler environment (on linux) that uses mingw.

You can install Docker to build on any Linux distro, and if one of those is Ubuntu then you can use https://github.com/mxe/mxe to further build for Windows. Or VirtualBox + Ubuntu + MXE.