name FreeCAD 0.91 instead of 0.20, means version after 0.19 could be 0.91

[NormandC]

The example of Normand doesn't seem very exotic. How would you model it?

As I said, I never constructed this way and I wonder if other CAD programs support this in a usable manner. In my practice I use tables with definitions of positions and sizes, similar as for example demonstrated in this FC tutorial video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63PfO0W5x-I

In Solidworks when I needed to change e.g. the position if a drill for a screw, I changed its position in the construction table. All other methods they showed us in CAD training made problems with real-life projects (Solidworks became slow and not seldom even became unresponsive.)

Not only it is usable in Solid Edge, I use it very often. There are use cases where not having this possibility will impede your design work flow. Block and washer was too easy an example. Think bicycle frame. How do you model the tube that goes from the rear wheel hub to the seat tubing, which is slanted? You don't have orthogonal planes anywhere. How do you define the length and the angled cuts?

Right now, I can do this in FreeCAD, without any assembly workbench. But how can that be? PartDesign is supposedly "broken". Go figure.

[uwestoehr]

Think bicycle frame. How do you model the tube that goes from the rear wheel hub to the seat tubing, which is slanted? You don't have orthogonal planes anywhere. How do you define the length and the angled cuts?
... But how can that be? PartDesign is supposedly "broken". Go figure.

Why do you say PartDesign is broken? That was the statement of another user.
My point is that you said it is a must have for an assembler to provide-in-assembly designing. I think this is nice to have but no must and thus having a WB like A2plus is already sufficient to compete with other CAD programs in terms of real-life productivity.

Concerning your bicycle frame example I can only describe how my workflow with SolidWorks was in such cases:
1. make a sketch and draw the frame since there is a symmetric plane for the frame. So the sketch is in this plane
2. split the sketch in several parts resulting in several new sketches
3. create the parts out of these sketches with strong focus that these parts can easily and thus cheaply be manufactured
4. assembly the different parts and check again that the different parts can easily be assembled

I reality the result was that step 4 lead to changes in the parts so usually one had to go back to step 1 several times. I mean one will in many cases construct more than the mechanical guys can do for costs you can explain your boss.
So your example made it quite clear that in-assembly designing can even have disadvantages. As I stated before every part needs to be manufactured on its own. In almost all real-life cases the different parts of an assembly are manufactured by different persons or companies and they give you feedback on your design - per part, not per assembly.

So maybe we can agree that FC lacks an "official" assembly WB and that for the first step a simple assembler like A2plus would be sufficient for many applications. For future in-assembly functionality can be added.

By the way, since one is always under pressure to reduce the manufacturing costs, I discovered recently the structural analysis of Z88:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4u5KAV4EYk
This doesn't work yet very conveniently but it already helped me to reduce the volume and weight of parts I recently designed and it is for free.

[chrisb]

How big does the "room for improvements" needs to be for you to qualify it as broken?

These notions are independent from each other. Cited from the bug submission guidelines:

The definition of a bug is this: Something that is not working, but for which you are sure that it should be working (for example it worked in the past, or it is advertised on the FreeCAD documentation wiki). Otherwise, it might be simply that what you want is not implemented, or maybe you are doing something wrong.

The fact that you need a feature very urgently or that it could be so much better does not make it a bug.

[saso]

This is not about the individual tools or bugs, but about the way how you create the model, the structure behind it. And all the tools and workbenches should support it and assist the user in creating this structure.

[Joel_graff]

How big does the "room for improvements" needs to be for you to qualify it as broken? They are quite far from where they should be... And what models one can do at present with them should actually not be a real criteria. One can do awesome things with Blender, this does not mean a thing about what we are trying to do with FreeCAD.

I must disagree on this point. Whether or not the present capabilities of the software meet the current needs of it's users is really the only criterion that matters when one is judging whether or not a project is production-ready. Obviously, that means we need to support industry-standard workflows (or provide a reasonable alternative), but I think it's too easy to confuse a workflow with feature parity. The two are very different things.

Nevertheless, there's obviously a significant difference in views as to what it takes to create a 'v1.0'.

I think we are setting our standards too high. My own organization spends ridiculous sums of money for badly broken and buggy professional software by a major software CAD vendor. I'm not saying we should follow that example, but anyone who really uses complex professional software like parametric CAD packages knows that sometimes things get so bad, the vendor should not have been selling licenses for it in the first place. It happens. No one gets it right all the time... or (arguably) ever.

With that in mind, I think a functional and useful Assembly workbench justifies a 'v1.0', even if it lacks certain features that are key to efficient workflows. I'm not saying it's ready now - only that we shouldn't be reaching for features that aren't absolutely critical for production. The question is, "can you create your model in FreeCAD?", not "can you create your model using your preferred workflow in FreeCAD?"

<Ideological Rant>

Ultimately, the value of an open source project is determined by the community that uses it, not by it's feature parity with commercial
packages. Most open source projects know better than to think they can (or should) try to compete directly with commercial vendors. It's not
really a question of quality as it is resources and goals.

Obviously, we must ultimately compete with the professional packages, but the the goals of an open source project tend to be orthogonal to the
goals of a commercial project. Commercial vendors exist to make money. Open source / free software projects exist to serve their users and,
really, make the world a better place. It took me a long time to realize that last point is actually a very important one.

Therefore, I think It's far more important that we consistently satisfy the needs of our current users, rather than try to achieve some arbitrary
level of feature parity with commercial package 'X'. If we can do that, (and I think we're reasonably close) we deserve a 'v1.0'.

</Ideological Rant>

[Zolko]

Part and PartDesign are in no way broken. They work as designed and can be used to build (great) models.

The very first thing anybody does with any CAD program is the extrusion of a 2D sketch. In FreeCAD, both Part and PartDesign have an "Extrude" function, But they are different and incompatible. The PartDesign WB extrusion can only extrude perpendicular to the sketch's plane, with some limited length options. The Part WB extrude can extrude along any vector, and has taper functionality (which is fundamental for mould builders), but is limited to extrude to a distance.

And this is by design ? You mean someone actually though "Hey, let's implement the most basic and fundamental function of a CAD software, and let's implement it twice, in 2 different namespaces, in 2 incompatible containers, with each implementation having only half of the functionality. This is going to be great !". You very well know that this is not by design, that PartDesign has been merged in a big chunk and took 2 years to integrate, and now that code is orphaned since 18 months, why do you say such blatantly false statements ?

And the problem is not only that this functionality is limited and broken, but that the process to lead to this situation is also broken: why wasn't this intercepted during merging ? Why wasn't the developer who proposed the 2nd implementation — whichever it was — been told that a similar function already existed, and he should improve that one instead of rewriting a new implementation, with some important features missing ? This is not — only — about functionality, but also methodology: what is the development process in FreeCAD ? Do you really thing that by jumping the version number to the magical 1.0 nobody will see that it's still alpha quality software ? Do you really take people for so stupid that they will fall for such primitive marketing ? You're targeting engineers, FFS !

Think bicycle frame. [...] Right now, I can do this in FreeCAD, without any assembly workbench

obviously you can since a bicycle frame is not an assembly. Again this cheap propaganda. Do you realise what sort of people you're talking to ?

The question of production-level software is not the feature-set, it's the dependability: users know that a given function-name does what it also does in other similar software, and that the time they invest in learning and developing things will not be lost, that the data/documents/models they make now can still be used in 5 years. With FreeCAD, any engineer who sees that there are 2 different ways to do extrusion knows that this is unfinished software, one of the two will be dropped, or both, and their existing models will not be usable anymore.

That doesn't mean you can't do great stuff today, it means that the great thing you do today might be lost next year. Therefore: it's not production quality software. Not for a general purpose CAD system. May-be you should fork the project and choose a different name without "CAD" in it ?

[saso]

The question is, "can you create your model in FreeCAD?", not "can you create your model using your preferred workflow in FreeCAD?"

This only confirms to me why things are the way they are at the moment. FreeCAD had quite a clear goal and was on a good path to it, lately however no one cares anymore what the tools, concepts and methods of a fully parametric modeler are, everyone is happy with their 5 icons and beyond that who cares how everything else should fit and work together...

It's not really a question of quality as it is resources and goals.

You do realize that we mostly have five implementations of everything and each one going in to its own direction with little or even no compatibility between them. It is hard to see quality in that and meaningful use of resources...

Open source / free software projects exist to serve their users and, really, make the world a better place.

Nice, but I don't see that, everyone seems to be more just serving them self. Because if one would really look forward to make a greater impact in the world then one would realize that trying to have some compatibility with the common practices and standards is probably not such a bad thing to build on.

[chrisb]

All of this is perhaps right for software being programmed by a very well paid team of developers with some marketing guys telling the project manger what they need next.

FreeCAD is - you might have guessed from the name - free. Free of charge, free access to all (re)sources, and free for free programmers. And it is very natural that they program what they need. Why should I program a post processor for the Path workbench that suits many machines but not mine? You might say it should not be merged, because other things are more important, but there is no guarantee that those more important things ever come. So let's simply take what we have and what makes FreeCAD better.
Try to see it from a different point of view: FreeCAD is a set of programs under a common roof. Stay in your room and things are mostly smooth. Use something from another room can be smooth as well, but sometimes it is a bit rough.

@Zolko: if FreeCAD is really that bad, why did you not leave for something better? Obviously because it has something that others don't.

[GeneFC]

Do you realise what sort of people you're talking to ?

That is just toooo funny.

We have had this discussion before. Not everyone is trying to build an Airbus.

But in light of this new revelation I will never question Your Excellency again.

Gene

[saso]

The very first thing anybody does with any CAD program is the extrusion of a 2D sketch. In FreeCAD, both Part and PartDesign have an "Extrude" function, But they are different and incompatible. The PartDesign WB extrusion can only extrude perpendicular to the sketch's plane, with some limited length options. The Part WB extrude can extrude along any vector, and has taper functionality (which is fundamental for mould builders), but is limited to extrude to a distance.

And this is by design ? You mean someone actually though "Hey, let's implement the most basic and fundamental function of a CAD software, and let's implement it twice, in 2 different namespaces, in 2 incompatible containers, with each implementation having only half of the functionality. This is going to be great !". You very well know that this is not by design, that PartDesign has been merged in a big chunk and took 2 years to integrate, and now that code is orphaned since 18 months, why do you say such blatantly false statements ?

And the problem is not only that this functionality is limited and broken, but that the process to lead to this situation is also broken: why wasn't this intercepted during merging ? Why wasn't the developer who proposed the 2nd implementation — whichever it was — been told that a similar function already existed, and he should improve that one instead of rewriting a new implementation, with some important features missing ? This is not — only — about functionality, but also methodology: what is the development process in FreeCAD ? Do you really thing that by jumping the version number to the magical 1.0 nobody will see that it's still alpha quality software ? Do you really take people for so stupid that they will fall for such primitive marketing ? You're targeting engineers, FFS !

Well, you are talking here about a very clean and ideal implementation of an commercial parametric cad ala solidworks, nx, creo,... There are probably a few different reasons, like the history of FC development and the very diverse community (for sure more then any commercial tool has!) why some of the things are the way they are and why some things will probably also have to stay that way. The thing that bothers me is actually not that things are broken, or that there are bugs or that some functionality is missing, this is all fixable even if it takes years, but that so many are ignoring this and are even in complete denial.

The question of production-level software is not the feature-set, it's the dependability: users know that a given function-name does what it also does in other similar software, and that the time they invest in learning and developing things will not be lost, that the data/documents/models they make now can still be used in 5 years.

Exactly