What's new with freecad 0.17 stable is that it is now based on the latest Open Cascade Technology (occt) 7.2.0. Unfortunately these occt packages are incompatible with occt 7.1.0 which was provided with the freecad-daily builds. We didn't have a choice but to force removal of occt 7.1.0 packages on end users' systems who also have freecad-daily installed, which in turn will remove the freecad-daily package.
The next day debuted the v0.18_pre development cycle on the freecad-daily PPA, and we synchronized its occt version with the one from freecad-stable. However users who updated freecad-stable first will need to install the freecad-daily package back.
On another note, a new freecad-legacy PPA was set up to continue to offer v0.16.
The reasoning is that documents made under v0.16 PartDesign (PD) must be migrated to v0.17 in order to edit them. Simple feature edits won't require migration, but if you want to add new PD features, a migration wizard will launch and offer you to migrate the document automatically. This causes no trouble if the document only contains PartDesign features; however, if it contains a mix of PartDesign features and objects made in the Part workbench (for example Boolean operations between PD features), then the automatic migration process will most likely fail and may leave the model in a broken state. In this case it is best to migrate the document manually, but this will require some work depending on the document's complexity, and a good working knowledge will be necessary.
For less experienced users, we feel it will be preferable to continue to work on v0.16 models using FreeCAD 0.16. Or, you can post on the Help forum for help on manually migrating your models to v0.17.
To sum it up, there are now 3 PPA which can be installed concurrently:
- freecad-stable : offers the latest "stable" release, to this date 0.17.13509, package name freecad ;
- freecad-daily : offers the latest development version compiled from source almost daily, right now tagged 0.18~beta, package name freecad-daily ;
- freecad-legacy : will offer legacy versions of FreeCAD, obviously a single package is available right now, package name freecad-0.16.