Part Design Roadmap

[ickby]

Hello,

a while ago we set out to bring the Part Design changes from a stale branch into master. Now this is on hold again since quite some time. To avaid a stale branch and lost work we should now decide how to go on with this. The current problem is the following:

There is the main branch (https://github.com/blobfish/FreeCAD_sf_ ... its/rebase) which is rebased, workable and used by jriegel to base his assembly work on. Then there are Fat-Zers branches with multiple structure and code enhancements. However, as Fat-Zer and DeepSoic changed quite a lot in those branches we can not go any further without those to be finalized. No work on this has been pushed since a month. This completle blocks any development from other contributors and any chance to bring this project forwards.

We should give ourself a time frame till christmas to finsih this work. This should be a time until which the current branch with expressions should be stable enough to release so that we can start 0.17 with the merge of part design. So I currently see 3 possible ways to do this:

1. Fat-Zer gives a planning of things to do and estmates when they will be done, including the branch updates and the migration workflow. This planning should result in a finalisation till christmas.

2. Fat-Zer finalizes the changes he has done and provides a branch we can use to work with. This should be done in this month. The migration and stuff could then be handled by us.

3. We abandon the changes and work with the current main branch. The migration would be implemented ontop of it.

So guys what are your opinions? No-one of us has unlimited resources, we need to make compromises to get this going. It is just the question which one.

Edit: Note that this also tackles the recently mentioned rebase problem. We need to decide which branch gets rebased.

Stefan

[DeepSOIC]

Can we just take fat-zer's current state? As far as I understand, he has implemented drag-and-drop of objects between parts, which is a small but very important tool of manual migration.

[ickby]

Can we just take fat-zer's current state?

As far as I know there is no current state as there are at least two branches with the recent changes. Hence he would need to bring in at least a little work to provide this for us. That is what I have listed as option 2.

EDIT: just to note, I would also like his work to be used very much.

[jmaustpc]

My opinion is that as a general rule it would be best to keep it as simple as possible and get it into master as soon as possible....and then continue development from there. But I don't pretend to understand much of the issues, code etc. ...I just made some of the Assembly icons.

[abdullah]

An outsider's point of view.

It seems that the most advanced migration is one of the branches of fat-zer. If you, icby, consider the best starting point towards migration is to use that branch, then I would suggest to PM fat-zer. If he has time now, he may want to post the pull request himself. If he does not have the time and you do, then you might want to prepare a pull request based on his branch, so that the rest can start integrating the remaining features on top of that pull request.

Just my two cents as a total outsider to this assembly project... an outsider that would definitely like this to be merged though

[triplus]

From user point of view i would like to see FreeCAD 0.16 released this year and i don't think it's worth the risk to put the PartDesign NEXT stuff in it. That should go in FreeCAD 0.17 and hopefully should be polished by the end of the next year when FreeCAD 0.17 would be released.

Therefore some sort of strategy on how to do this with as less hassle as possible should be set. Maybe to see if there are any oppressing bugs to be fixed in the next moth or two for production release. Therefore "feature freeze" phase and after FreeCAD 0.16 release. After to merge all the changes ready to be merged into master and start on FreeCAD 0.17. As it turned out new features are to big to be finished this year but as the pressure to put them in the master is quite big therefore maybe FreeCAD 0.16 release could be pushed forward to November.

[DeepSOIC]

I have PM'ed Fat-Zer, just in case he might have not noticed this discussion yet.

Hi!
We are considering taking one of your branches for further development, and we'd love to hear something from you.
The discussion is happening here:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12713
Generally, I'd like to see a brief overview of the state of some of your branches. That is, what was the most important stuff that was done there, and, even more importantly, is there anything horribly broken there waiting attention?

[kcleung]

I have PM'ed Fat-Zer, just in case he might have not noticed this discussion yet.

Hi!
We are considering taking one of your branches for further development, and we'd love to hear something from you.
The discussion is happening here:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12713
Generally, I'd like to see a brief overview of the state of some of your branches. That is, what was the most important stuff that was done there, and, even more importantly, is there anything horribly broken there waiting attention?

Suppose if we still cannot get hold of Fat-Zer say within a week, then should we go ahead and do it ourself? If so, then there are two options:

1. Abandon his changes and IMMEDIATELY work on the current dev-assembly-next branch, with view to merge it with the main branch as soon as possible.

2. We finalize the work of Fat-Zer, and then merge his relevant branches into the current dev-assembly-next branch before merging the dev-assembly-next branch to the main branch.

Do you think the work involved in (2) will be unrealistic if we don't know the state of Fat-Zer's branches and end up having to work out what is broken in his branches?

We can't allow it to drag on and have to make a prompt decision.

[ickby]

Ok I tested Fat-Zer's latest branch. The additions and changes are pretty awesome, even though they do not yet work perfectly. But I think with a few adjustments here and there this is going to be fine. As we did not yet receive any feedback from him, I think I use his repository and work with it. First I add all changes from my repo. Then woring on improving the migration (interesstingly he already has a working base version)

As I always have only a few hours here and there this will go slowly, but hopefully fast enough. I provide a branch on tandersons repo when the incorporation is done, so that anybody interested can work on this too.

[DeepSOIC]

Glad to hear that!
My plans have gone bust, but I think I may have some coding time in near future. Right now - it's actually not that I don't have time for it - I don't want to, I have some more interesting stuff I want to do.