GSoC '18: CM Project Thread

[kkremitzki]

That will make many people happy, I'm sure.

Regarding Py3/Qt5, without QtWebkit, does that mean that the StartPage and Web wb aren't built?

Qt 5 WebKit is still available, so as soon as the port to Py3/Qt5 is done, on Debian at least, we can re-enable the Start WB. The whole WebKit->WebEngine thing we don't need to worry about just yet.

[kkremitzki]

I have the French and Italian PDFs built, but I ran into some problems building the translated built-in help files: while they seem to build fine, when you actually do Help > Help in-program, the resultant help docs have a working translated table of contents but none of the actual contents links work.

I'm going to end up using the alternatives system for freecad-doc as well, so that for example you can have freecad-doc-en and freecad-doc-fr installed, and if you do sudo update-alternatives --config freecad-doc you can pick between the two for which you'd like to use for the in-program help system.

[kkremitzki]

Ok, problem fixed, the French and Italian docs now work in Qt Assistant and when browsing them via Help > Help but unfortunately the "What's this?" button is still opening up the help documents in English.

Edit: Got the in-app stuff working, so for example hitting F1 shows me the help with "Bienvenue dans l'aide en ligne de FreeCAD..." as expected, and clicking Shift+F1/"What's this?" gets me the French docs for the button I click. However, my approach was a bit hacky so I'll need to clean it up.

[NormandC]

Great!

Can't wait for your less "hacky" approach.

[yorik]

Great job Kurt!

I wouldn't worry much about the PDF versions.. I don't think anyone ever used these pdf versions of the docs. It's probably much more interesting to generate the pdf from the manual pages, as they are properly formatted to make a book. (Talking about this, I'd like to relaunch the idea of publishing it as a real book at some point..)

[NormandC]

There is a coin3 4.0.0~cmake already in Debian experimental but it looks like it's too old to work, but that means the skeleton is already there for updating it.

Hi Kurt,

I don't know if updating the coin3 packages is in your purview, but if you get the chance to work on it at some point, there is a libexpat1 version conflict that started on Ubuntu 17.10 with v2.2.3 (and must surely exist on Debian stable), it seems that coin3D comes with its own older private expat version. This results in FreeCAD crashing when trying to open/import an SVG file as geometry. The deb package would need to be patched to rely on the system libexpat1 library instead, if I understand what wmayer wrote in the following post.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 10#p208769

We will be getting this issue more and more. Latest one today: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=29913

Thanks.

[kkremitzki]

There is a coin3 4.0.0~cmake already in Debian experimental but it looks like it's too old to work, but that means the skeleton is already there for updating it.

Hi Kurt,

I don't know if updating the coin3 packages is in your purview, but if you get the chance to work on it at some point, there is a libexpat1 version conflict that started on Ubuntu 17.10 with v2.2.3 (and must surely exist on Debian stable), it seems that coin3D comes with its own older private expat version. This results in FreeCAD crashing when trying to open/import an SVG file as geometry. The deb package would need to be patched to rely on the system libexpat1 library instead, if I understand what wmayer wrote in the following post.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 10#p208769

We will be getting this issue more and more. Latest one today: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=29913

Thanks.

Yes, this problem is definitely in my wheelhouse. For reference, here's the relevant bug in Debian.

[NormandC]

Thanks. I had noticed that bug report created by mlampert.

[kkremitzki]

Hi folks, an update:

My internet has been a huge pain, having gone out maybe 50 times in the last week for times ranging from tens of minutes to hours. So it's been somewhat difficult to work, since while I can bring my laptop elsewhere to work, I usually work in parallel on several machines, so my productivity is cut regardless.

Netgen has finally transitioned from experimental to unstable. It was failing on all build arches besides amd64, but I finally fixed them. With that done, I uploaded them to the daily PPA but it looks like building FreeCAD with my Netgen package doesn't actually work right now. So, I'd like to engage the community to help me troubleshoot this; try compiling using the package in the freecad-daily PPA. It may be a problem with the packaging or something that needs updating in the FreeCAD source.

On the gmsh front, it turns out that my updated package which was built against OCCT, somehow actually isn't linked against OCCT and fails to mesh. A bug was filed in Debian about this: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=904946 which I spent some time troubleshooting but haven't found a solution yet.

I also have been working on the libexpat/coin problem. This one is fairly tricky; the "right" solution is to remove the included copy of expat in coin, and to build it against the system expat. This was done, but then reverted, because it turns out that for some reason the patch to build against system expat didn't actually result in the system expat being used, so the failures were still occurring. So, this is a bug in coin itself. I spent some time trying to troubleshoot this as well but I think fixing it before GSoC is over is unlikely.

An alternative solution I also explored is to try to hasten the adoption of the coin package currently in Debian experimental, version 4.0.0, which supports cmake. However, this would require rebuilding pivy, which in turn would require rebuilding soqt against coin as well, but the soqt package as it stands doesn't work with coin 4. I attempted to update the soqt package to integrate upstream changes, but then pivy didn't work with that version of soqt.

In better news, sliptonic led an effort to convince upstream to relicense OpenVoronoi and OpenCAMLib from GPL3 to LGPL so that it could be integrated into the Path workbench. As part of that effort, I committed to packaging both, which I've completed:
https://salsa.debian.org/kkremitzki-guest/openvoronoi
https://salsa.debian.org/kkremitzki-guest/opencamlib

I also submitted a pull request against pivy upstream to integrate our Python 3 changes: https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/pivy/pull-requests/1

In this final week or so, I am going to finish the multi-lingual support of the freecad-doc package and submit it for review; once I've done that, I can upload it to the PPA as well. Besides that, I'm going to try to finish up the pivy and freecad-python3 stuff. If I can get this pivy pull request merged and tagged in time, I should make it.

[looo]

I also submitted a pull request against pivy upstream to integrate our Python 3 changes:

If you do this, please keep the commits. Else it's going to be a mess to add new changes. Also I do not see much sense in in this action. For freecad it is much more benefit, if we have control over pivy... So if possible use sources from GitHub.