build option PCL, is there a benefit enabling PCL ?

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ipatch
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build option PCL, is there a benefit enabling PCL ?

Post by ipatch »

i've been working on publishing an updated FreeCAD.app bundle for macos via the homebrew-freecad repo releases page. i've been attempting to "check all the boxes" to make the release as inclusive as possible. something i've noticed in the summary report after running

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cmake ...
is seeing the below output

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-- PCL:                 not enabled
-- pybind11:            not enabled
i'm pretty sure PCL referes to the point clould library. as if i add the below cmake option

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-DFREECAD_USE_PCL=1
it seems the cmake configure scripts can find the PCL lib and begin to configure the build to use PCL.

now the thing is if i enable PCL via cmake, i then have to enable a plethora of other prefix paths for cmake to produce a valid build dir or else cmake will complain about not finding certain libs ie. the list of the libs i end up having to manually add to the prefix path is below,

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$pthpcl;$pthglew;$pthjsoncpp;$pthdoubleconversion;$pthjpeg;$pthtiff;$pthutf8cpp
all those shell env vars point to the installation paths for the respected library.

so at this point getting PCL going requires a lot manual intervention, and doing a search for PCL or even point cloud library on the wiki yields zero results for either of those search terms.

at this point is it even beneficial to enable Point Cloud Library for the freecad build?

i don't mind going further down this rabbit hole to make the build more robust, but i also want to attempt to try and spend my efforts as efficiently as i can.

this also begs the question , is it (still) beneficial to enable the below cmake config switch / option?

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-DFREECAD_USE_PYBIND11=1
i did a couple of searches that the pybind11 library overlaps with the boost libs and that more recent versions of boost (i'm building and linking against the v1.76 of boost) use the C++ 11 standard language features. so is it beneficial to toggle this option on as well?
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iplayfast
Posts: 256
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2019 6:55 am

Re: build option PCL, is there a benefit enabling PCL ?

Post by iplayfast »

I had the same problem and gave up.
I use

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cmake .. -DBUILD_QT5=ON -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 -DFREECAD_USE_PCL=OFF
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