Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

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gdo35
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Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:25 pm

Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by gdo35 »

NormandC wrote:As for: is the plan really to package it for Ubuntu?
After all, why not ?

The FreeCAD package has nothing to envy to other packages...
Its integration and build are smart so doing the same for OCCT is possible.

But packaging OCCT was quite long and it needs further tests.
According to its licence, shouldn't be in 3rd party softwares ?, pushing FreeCAD there too...

And even there is not really much package depending of liboce, they need to switch to libopencascade too :

Code: Select all

$ apt-cache rdepends liboce-* | egrep -v "(oce|opencascade)" | egrep "^\s" | sort -u
  freecad
  freecad-daily
  gmsh
  libgmsh2v5
  libnglib-4.9.13
  netgen
  science-engineering-dev
  science-nanoscale-physics-dev
Moreover Normand must sleep and catch his breath !!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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NormandC
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Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by NormandC »

gdo35 wrote:After all, why not ?
Let me reply with another question. Who will do it? I won't, and Kurt won't either. sgrogan is already taking care of the Windows builds and the Ubuntu PPA.

I said it a few times here so sorry to those who've read it: I have no interest in packaging for the sake of packaging. All I'm interested in is having the latest libraries in our FreeCAD PPAs because that's what I use.

My real interest is using FreeCAD and helping others learn to use it. I'm fine with seeing OCCT being packaged in Debian/Ubuntu, in fact it would make things a lot easier for the PPA. But I wish others would contribute to that goal. Plain and simple: sgrogan, kkremitzki (even though he's a new community member) and I have our hands full.
gdo35
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Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:25 pm

Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by gdo35 »

Hi,

Normand, I did not ask you to do it and I fully understand your position. ;)

If FreeCAD now uses OCCT that is not packaged in official repositories, FreeCAD Ubuntu version will stay stucked to version 0.16 with liboce...
I got that kind of problem (but for different reasons) with KiCAd for electronics designs some times ago.

My concern today is to have access to a full free software solution in mechanics, electronics and computing for robotics purpose.
I would like it could be simple as a package installation rather than installing one PPA per soft...

I dont ask actual FreeCAD maintainers to do it, I just would like to know your opinion about the idea and its benefits.
And if I or someone else decide to do it, I'm pretty sure to get all the support needed here. ;)
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NormandC
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Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by NormandC »

gdo35 wrote:If FreeCAD now uses OCCT that is not packaged in official repositories, FreeCAD Ubuntu version will stay stucked to version 0.16 with liboce...
The current master works with OCE, after all that's what the freecad-daily package was using until just yesterday! :D It's only that some FEM features are disabled, and there are more geometry bugs related to the kernel.
gdo35 wrote:I just would like to know your opinion about the idea and its benefits.
Well I said I was all for it, didn't I? ;)

I'm not sure if you know the history of OCC vs. OCE in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. Up until 2012, libopencascade was in their repositories. But it was licensed under an OCCT license, which was similar to LPGL with some clauses, but many Linux distros didn't consider it truly free so they didn't include it. Then the OCE fork came, they brought cmake support and it was more in line with free software principles so Debian/Ubuntu quickly switched to it.

Unfortunately they stopped updating at 6.8.0 in 2015 while OCCT development was marching on. tanderson69 here created a branch based on occt 6.9.0 and it was left in the sidelines for more than a year. The most active OCE developers have stopped contributing. OCE 0.18 release in January is still based on OCCT 6.9.1 (which was released in September 2015!), and it was released one month after OCCT 7.1.0. I've seen no discussion on the oce-dev mailing list about upgrading to OCCT 7.x. The project may not be dead, but it looks to be in maintenance mode.

Meanwhile OCCT changed its license to LGPL v2.1 and switched their build system to CMake. So to me, some of the original reasons for starting OCE are gone (one remains, the necessity of signing an agreement to contribute to OCCT code).

So yeah, to sum it up, I believe that Debian/Ubuntu should switch back to opencascade, which is the project that has a clearer future.
gdo35 wrote:And if I or someone else decide to do it, I'm pretty sure to get all the support needed here. ;)
Of course!
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CADennis
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Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by CADennis »

bonjour, maybe you can help out, I have a question slightly off topic to this thread but your tremendous efforts show that I need your expertise: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 28#p171028 ...thx
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NormandC
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Re: Ubuntu PPA Maintenance Coordination

Post by NormandC »

Hi CADennis,

I replied to your topic.
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