Windows LibPack and OCE

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shoogen
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Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by shoogen »

As soon as the 0.13 version ships, the question of updating the windows libpack will become apparent. Would it make any sense to include OCE in the libpack instead of the original OCCT? IMHO this step would be foremost a political statement. But maybe this can encurage FreeCAD devs to contribute to OCE which are curently hold back by the fact that theier bugfix will never make it into OCCT.
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by wmayer »

It was always planned to move to OCE.

And also on Ubuntu it's planned to move to OCE because OCC packages are marked as deprecated. However, at the moment on Ubuntu we are still stuck with OCC because the OCE packages are broken. If they are built on x86 then you get linker errors with x64 or vice versa because of some hard-coded symlinks.
But maybe this can encourage FreeCAD devs to contribute to OCE which are currently hold back by the fact that their bugfix will never make it into OCCT.
Is this a fact?
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jriegel
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by jriegel »

Im already in the progress of doing a new LibPack for Windows. After long toying with MinGW I finally decided to use VisualStudio Express 2012 for the X86 and X64 lib pack.
Starting with 0.14 I will do a X64 windows release too.

For sure I will switch to OCE and put some other libs in I'm long interested in. E.g. SCL (FOSS step library) and the PCL.
Python 2.7.3 , Qt 4.8.4 and some other updates. Also, as already mentioned, the switch from PyQt to PySide.
will see how it turn out ;)
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NormandC
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by NormandC »

wmayer wrote:And also on Ubuntu it's planned to move to OCE because OCC packages are marked as deprecated. However, at the moment on Ubuntu we are still stuck with OCC because the OCE packages are broken. If they are built on x86 then you get linker errors with x64 or vice versa because of some hard-coded symlinks.
If I remember correctly the fix may be a stupid thing. It's just that the "control" text file for one of the -dev packages is set to "Architecture: any" instead of "Architecture: all" or something like that.

But this was for Ubuntu 12.04, I thought the problem was different for Ubuntu 12.10?

We could always create a new PPA where we build OCE. I don't think we can put it in the same PPA because we already use about half of the 2GB storage limit. So someone who wants to use our version of FreeCAD would need to add 2 PPA repos instead of one.

Now that I have a fast quad-core CPU it should not take me long to test OCE builds... Maybe we could set up a clone bzr repo of the Github OCE repo and a recipe to build on demand (not daily this would be unnecessary use of server time)...

It would be time consuming and a general hassle, but maybe the best way to test OCE with FreeCAD on Ubuntu...
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by pperisin »

jriegel wrote:...Qt 4.8.4...
Why not 5.0 - it is a release candidate now - it is planned to be released in a week or two.
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by wmayer »

Why not 5.0 - it is a release candidate now - it is planned to be released in a week or two.
Because then you also have to port FreeCAD to this new version which may introduce a lot of API changes. Although the Qt team says that from Qt4 to Qt5 it's not such a big step as from Qt3 to Qt4 you have to touch FreeCAD code.

Another point is that in the past few years there was often a regression when Qt made a minor release. It then took a couple of bugfix releases to make it stable again. And also as long as the most important Linux distributions don't offer packages we shouldn't move on Windows either.

IMO it's better to take the opportunity to support Qt5 in parallel (but let Qt4 the default) and once the distributions move to Qt5 we can do the switch too.
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by mrlukeparry »

from what I read, some features / improvements of QT 5 are being back ported to a 4.8 release that can be easily absorbed without changing any programming code.

From what snippets I have read I think the only major improvements are in the rendering performance and further improvement in the QtDeclarative / QML modules, which I don't think FreeCAD would truly benefit straight away from.

The only other change that is relevant to Coin3D / SoQT is their OpenGL changes, but who knows whether Coin3d's code base will change to take advantage of these changes.

I cannot see there being an uptake in QT 5 for Linux Distributions at least till the new KDE 5 Framework gains momentum.

I do hope that we can universally agree that QT 4.8 will be used as standard in FreeCAD 0.14 so we can use QML without having to worry
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jriegel
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by jriegel »

The main focus of the (paid) development in Qt was the mobile strategy of Nokia. How that turned out we all know :)
I think we are good with 4.8.x for a long time, since we don't need the features of 5 anyway.

I still wait for a release of Coin3D as BSD. The Master branch state already 4.0.0b but the last official release is still 3.x with GPL....
I think we have to wait there.....
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jriegel
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by jriegel »

Ok, i also give up on VisualStudio 2012. Some of our libs are not compiling very well with this compiler. I don't like the idea to patch all our libs.

So I will stick with VisualStudio 2008 with the new LibPack....
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sergeykurdakov
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Re: Windows LibPack and OCE

Post by sergeykurdakov »

jriegel wrote: The Master branch state already 4.0.0b but the last official release is still 3.x with GPL....
I think we have to wait there.....
it looks like here http://mailman.coin3d.org/pipermail/coi ... 18377.html they say they will support code for three months after transfer to BSD, according to https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/commits they really finished updating code at the end of 2011, so somehow ver 4.0 should be released without them see also https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/pull-requests

from what I see besides two pull requests there are few relevant issues for the past year

https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/issue ... tatus=open

some of these issues could be addressed ( most other are just requests for help ).

thus, given than actually no one improves the code, and there are few additions ( one two per year ) it could make sense just to have a FreeCAD own repository marked as either 4.0 or 3.2 . Given no development of Coin3D - FreeCAD will hardly loose anything, still it will be possible to ship as FreeCAD as a software without GPL linking problem. All header files in repository are already marked as BSD licensed - so any additions would be considered under this license. 
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