NormandC wrote:Hello Jean-Philippe,
Unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of work done in the past year since the PartDesignNext code was merged into the master branch.
I should rather say that work has indeed been done under the hood, changes to its foundation were made, but not much on the GUI side. There are still many critical bugs that can make FreeCAD crash. For most of the past year, a single developer was working on it in his limited spare time.
Who is the that? (I've been out of the loop for a while). I haven't been problems crashing, but it does seem like there are alot of critters.
NormandC wrote:
In its current state, IMHO it's nowhere near ready for release. Two or three devs have recently started tackling some outstanding issues. FreeCAD will be participating to GSoC this year (like last year) and two students have made proposals to work on PartDesign this summer. We do not know how many slots FreeCAD will get (if any), and what projects will be chosen. I dearly hope we get at least a slot for PartDesign work.
Since that PartDesign is the lynch pin to everything, I hope so as well. Freecad Path is what has gotten me into .17 and from what I understanding it relys on part design. As far as Gsoc is there any mechanism that you're aware of where we can petition, encourage, etc that FreeCAD gets some slots?
NormandC wrote:
I doubt it would be realistic to think of a release before the end of the year, unless there's a concerted push - something I don't see happening anytime soon, the development is too fragmented between at least a half dozen workbenches now (in the early years it was more focused).
I was impressed by how well the developers played together in FreeCAD. I was involved in a project a few years back where developers where tripping over each other breaking each others stuff. (It was not a pleasant.)
You had mentioned that there where critical decisions/infrastructure that needs to be made. Do you have the magic link handy that discusses this?(Yes I could find it if I spend the next few days combing through the forums where you probably know exactly where to look.)
NormandC wrote:
As for learning the new stuff or staying with the "old", it's mostly your decision (you can also do both), but you should know that the learning materials have not been updated, and even us old timers do not have a complete understanding of the new features.
After do some research I really like some of the features I'm seeing and would like to start doing real work using these features. Oth, it would suck if I wind up loosing significant work because there is a design to go in a different direction? As I've said I've been out of the loop for a while. Are things close to convergence?
As far as the workbenches under active development, I'm assume Arch, Path and PartDesign.. Are those the big hitters at the moent?
NormandC wrote:
If you want to contribute feedback, I urge you to first search for and read relevant topics in the Developer forums. Speaking only for myself I've become quite tired of newcomers who don't do their homework first and all repeat the same things over and over...
I can understand how tiring it can be to answer the same questions over and over.. I basically wanted to spend a couple of hours redoing a design, but now I've spent 1/2 day on the researching the forums and I'm no further along.