ickby wrote:Personally I'm highly against merging assembly2 into FreeCAD. I do appreciate the work done on the workbench and see its usefulness. However, due to FreeCAD implementation restrictions the workbench needed to use hacks to make assemblies work. This by no means a critic or depreciation on hamishs work, it is just what he needed to do to get it working. FreeCADs object model currently does miss many many things the workbench worked around, the topological naming too what also has seen many workarounds in the workbench.
Now merging it in means essentially making it the standard, even if we know it is bad design in many aspects. We will become responsible not only for updating but also fixing bugs in the future for something that we know we must deprecate one day or another. It will bind developer time which is already spare. And most likely people will start working on the workbench and even less time goes into the needed changes for a real full functional assembly workbench.
Ickby is right, he makes sense.
This code would be a dead end hack from a code perspective. As an optional plug-in that is OK but code going into master should following the long term goals and plans, standards and quality, other wise the code would eventually become low quality mixed up mess or even unmaintainable in the long term. From a users point of view it might seem useful but once in master, FreeCAD becomes obliged to support it for the long term, even if it was something that went in a direction we knew we were not going to go in the long term.
I don't want to sound negative about Hamish's great work but there is a lesson in this for anyone wanting to write code for a project...."talk to the project first". Hamish did what he did for his own reasons and that really is OK,
but my point is that in general cases you can save duplicated or misdirected effort if you discuss your plans first.
If someone wants to take over the maintenance of these add-ons, that would be nice. But I think we all see that they are (and I believe were always intended by Hamish?) only as a short term helpful add-on until the relevant functionality arrived in master.
I can't make a detailed judgement on Drawing Dimensioning, its not something I have used, but I think it could likely be better for a developer to spend the time fixing and bugs/missing functionality in TechDraw rather than spending too much effort on what is a dead end, but perhaps the effort is not that great? And anyway that decision is up to who ever wants to spend their own time however they choose, of course.
FreeCAD
