FreeCAD Development Objectives - 0.18?

[mrlukeparry]

Hi everyone,

I have been busy the past couple of years and starting to find I have a bit too much time on my hands. Hopefully, at some point i can share where I am.

A lot has changed in the FreeCAD development since I was last predominantly here. It seems like a lot of new people have come and some familiar faces have gone. But it is great to see the progress (and see TechDraw released to the masses). OCCT seems to be picking up pace.

Apologies for my ignorance, but other than the roadmap on the bug tracker, it is not really clear to me what the development priorities are now. The following to me seemed quite important at the time about 3-4 years ago:

Qt5
Python3 - PySide2 will be officially supported now in Qt 5.11
Assembly/Part Framework (kind of done)

Other than fixes, and minor features, what are the aims for the next 0.18 release?

Cheers,
Luke

[wandererfan]

Other than fixes, and minor features, what are the aims for the next 0.18 release?

There was a brainstorming exercise on what people would like to see in 0.18. Search "Open Discussion" for "Whiteboard".

We did not make it as far as actually setting priorities, but a few things stand out:
- dependency/platform issues wrt to getting a version published
- Assembly module
- Part Design Next "issues"/differences of opinion
- Python3, Qt5 migration

wf

[looo]

Hi Luke,

dependency/platform issues wrt to getting a version published

I guess this is the most important task for the next release and although there is the gsoc-project [1] there are still some open tasks. For example the gsoc-project doesn't have pivy listed. But pivy needs to be packged for python3 too. It would be also nice to get the cmake-branch of coin packaged. Also soqt (qt5) and some other libraries from the coin-stack are not on the list of the gsoc-project...

As an alternative I am working on conda-packages [2]. Which is also not done yet.


[1] http://brlcad.org/wiki/User:Kkremitzki
[2] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_Conda

[abdullah]

I have been busy the past couple of years and starting to find I have a bit too much time on my hands.

There is such a thing as "too much free time"? Usually FreeCAD takes care of that

Welcome back!!

IMO the most relevant aspects of v0.18 will be those said above, python3 support, migration and packaging. It has not been decided yet, but it was commented that v0.18 might be a shorter development cycle, as it was desirable to enter the dynamics of one release per year around December, in order to have an stable released version in time to enter into Debian and from there spread to the Linux ecosystem. The release of v0.17 took a lot of time and effort. A lot of focus is being put into automating/accelerating the time needed to release a new version.

Of course, there is always coding work, you have to decide what you would like to do next.

[chrisb]

In some areas there are already great things in the queue. Abdullah has improved Sketcher so that it can be marked as "solved". I will recheck when the pull request is merged, but there are almost no issues left.

[kkremitzki]

Hi Luke,

dependency/platform issues wrt to getting a version published

I guess this is the most important task for the next release and although there is the gsoc-project [1] there are still some open tasks. For example the gsoc-project doesn't have pivy listed. But pivy needs to be packged for python3 too. It would be also nice to get the cmake-branch of coin packaged. Also soqt (qt5) and some other libraries from the coin-stack are not on the list of the gsoc-project...

As an alternative I am working on conda-packages [2]. Which is also not done yet.


[1] http://brlcad.org/wiki/User:Kkremitzki
[2] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_Conda

I forgot about those, but they should definitely be included on the list!

[jmaustpc]

i everyone,

I have been busy the past couple of years and starting to find I have a bit too much time on my hands. Hopefully, at some point i can share where I am.

Hi Luke, welcome back, sure has been a while.
Jim

[Kunda1]

Hey luke,
Welcome back. I've encountered tickets with you involved in them some how. Excited to see FreeCAD dev team get more and more robust. Cheers!

[ickby]

Hello Luke, nice to see you back
as many people mentioned platform stuff, one thing that will become more and more important in this respect are the external modules. But currently the add-on installer does not support python package installation on which the add-ons depend. So a integration with pip could be super benefitial

[looo]

integration with pip could be super benefitial

+1 absolutly. I had the idea to first implement a python commandline tool, where pip-packages related to freecad are autocompleted. But this is currently not possible because FreeCAD uses a non standart way to get the list of attributes... It would be nice to change this to default python-behaviour. This should be possible with python3. So having a look at the __dir__ implementation of freecad-type would be also nice.