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!
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!