Description:

Since version 7.0.0, the kicad PKGBUILD switched from building with KICAD_USE_OCC to KICAD_USE_OCE.

See change in this commit: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/kicad/-/commit/24354666c8d45f11a18c9a3991510317856ca48c)

Historically, this flag controlled which 3D library KiCad used. It should be set to OCC when KiCad is built against opencascade, which KiCad uses on Arch. It should only be set to OCE when KiCad is built against opencascade Community Edition, which is not used on Arch. Therefore this is a misconfiguration in the PKGBUILD.

In fact, OCE is not supported at all in KiCad 7, and this build flag has no effect, which is why this hasn’t caused crashes on Arch.

After checking with the KiCad developers, they removed these outdated build flags from the developer documentation:

https://dev-docs.kicad.org/en/build/compile-options/
and the change here:
https://gitlab.com/kicad/services/kicad-dev-docs/-/commit/54f97da89c45b44d97eb71e44795ef695949691c

So I recommend that the KICAD_USE_OCE flag be removed entirely from the PKGBUILD. This is a non-functional change but it reduces confusion by deleting an unused (and in the past, incorrect) build flag.

This is of course not urgent, but FYI the KiCad 7.0.8 release is expected in a few days if that is convenient.