A need to have an open dialogue with upstream OCC team

[Kunda1]

Hey team and community, I'm just wondering about something I've observed in FC. So we rely on OCC in a pretty integral way and yet... it seems to me, my comprehension, that FC has very little (visible) relationship or dialogue with the upstream OCC devs. Again this is my comprehension. May I ask why?

As I've encountered in many tickets in the tracker, when @shoogen was active (way before my time), there was a lot of communication happening upstream. The evidence is in the abundance of upstream bugs he filed. He also posted on their forums. Now I'm not saying there is a total absence of dialogue happening, for example I know that @vejmarie has coordinated upstream and others in the community have as well. But it seems it could only benefit FC more if the communication channel was used more frequently and accessibly.

BTW, I was reminded by this by something @tanderson69 wrote in a recent thread

IMHO:
If you guys want to go "all in" on refinement, I think you should switch to occt::ShapeUpgrade_UnifySameDomain. Then work upstream with occt to work the bugs out. That might be a long haul so maybe that should wait until after a release.

This makes a lot of sense. Especially given we have these open issues:

• List of OCC bugs in the bugtracker
• Tagged OCC bugs
• OCC bugs that need to be bumped upstream

Thoughts?

[sgrogan]

Thoughts?

Yup, I think ickby sums it up pretty well here:https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 19#p128408

There are not many users that can make bug reports. This would require to build the latest opencascade master, rebuild freecad with this occ Version to verify the bug still exists and then learn the occ draw syntax to reproduce the bug for reporting in an appropriate format.

Shoogen did this regularly[sic] in the past, and quite a few of the reported bugs have been fixed, but then freecad did lag behind[sic] in support of occ7. This is done now, it compiles again with the latest Version. Now we need to find someone who takes the responsibility to do this.

The "opencascade-draw" Open CASCADE Technology CAE platform shared library package is available on the Ubuntu daily PPA.
Draw.exe is in the Win libpack but doesn't work because of a hard-coded path. This could be fixed if someone is intereted.

@shoogen and more recently @ickby have had success having occt bugs addressed. The key is to present them them with a proper draw script. It only takes a dedicated volunteer.

[tanderson69]

Don't forget about the CLA.

https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/30

[sgrogan]

some, but not all of the story: https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/30
@tanderson, what are your concerns?

[tanderson69]

2b

You agree that OPEN CASCADE SAS can do all things in relation to Your contribution as if OPEN CASCADE SAS were its
sole owner, and if OPEN CASCADE SAS makes a derivative work of Your contribution, OPEN CASCADE SAS will be the sole
owner of that derivative work;

Are you guys aware that occt sells proprietary occt components? For example:https://www.opencascade.com/content/express-mesh so someone writes a terrific algorithm and submits it into occt. Occt then decides this algorithm will add value to one of their proprietary addons. Now they are selling your code for their financial bottom line. Probably will never apply to me, but I don't know what the future holds and I don't want help set precedence.... so no thanks.

[sgrogan]

Are you guys aware that occt sells proprietary occt components?

I am.
I guess I'm talking of the a narrow context of signing the CLA to be able to post bugs to the tracker (with no intention of contributing code)
In the big picture and as a matter of principle I absolutely understand your point.

[tanderson69]

How many other open source projects exist that require a license agreement to get access to a bug tracker and a repository. I don't know of any, but I haven't researched it either.

[Kunda1]

How many other open source projects exist that require a license agreement to get access to a bug tracker and a repository. I don't know of any, but I haven't researched it either.

I haven't encountered any but that's not saying much. That is weird.

[keithsloan52]

I have only raised a bug with OCC once or twice.

If I remember correctly the procedure was to capture a brep file of the problem and then having to do something
with draw.exe so that the OCC developers could reproduce

I think it would be helpful it somebody went back through the forum and documented the outline procedure.
I am sure shoogen gave details in the past.

Have vague recollection that there was a workbench where you could select an object and export it as a brep file.
Not that difficult to code if not. Does Sandbox workbench ring any bells?

[keithsloan52]

Yes I was right there was a workbench called Sandbox that was supposed to help.
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 5&p=140109