Discussion: using FreeCAD or App namespaces, which is prefered

[fosselius]

is that assumption a good one? Or is this particular test poorly written, and needs to import FreeCAD itself?

No, Yes ^_^

[galou_breizh]

There are even another alternatives:

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from freecad import app

and

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from freecad import gui

.

These are just other places to find the modules, as a proof:

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>>> app is App
True
>>> gui is FreeCADGui
True

There is also

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import freecad

but this one is not equivalent to "FreeCAD":

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>>> import freecad
>>> freecad is FreeCAD
False

I wanted to used

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from freecad import app

in all macros of the official macro repository but some people (I think people on Windows) complained that there was no freecad module (small letters). What is currently used in the official macros is

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import FreeCAD as app

. Uses of "FreeCAD" and "App" are then replaced with "app". Once one of the variants settles down, this should be a matter of changing one line in each macro.

Gaël

[triplus]

In my opinion it makes sense to wait for Qt 6 and to first see what they understand under the term "introducing more Pythonic API". After i guess we can discuss if FreeCAD should have more Pythonic API, closer to Qt one, i guess Python bindings. After i guess we can discuss if new import module style needs to or should adapt more. As currently we likely wouldn't be able to decide if FreeCAD/freecad/App/app ... should be used. In addition if other libraries would do the same, for example it would not be numpy but it would be app. That likely wouldn't end up all that good. For now therefore use:

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import FreeCAD as App
import FreeCADGui as Gui

That is the most consistent solution, and it aligns well with C++ counterpart. Don't assume, in your code, somebody else already did the imports.

P.S. As for the new import style modules, and the current situation, best if @looo describes what makes the most sense.

[looo]

P.S. As for the new import style modules, and the current situation, best if @looo describes what makes the most sense.

I guess it's quite simple. We never fully moved towards new-style modules and we support both methods. If we would move fully towards new-style modules this will have a similar impact as the change from python2 to python3. Means that we most likely fully break backwards compatibility. Thats why I suggest to use new-style where possible and use the old way if there is no other option.

Regarding the topic, I did some experiments with "from freecad import app" and actually I don't have issues with this. But I don't see a big issue with using something like this:

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import FreeCAD as app

once we decide to fully switch to new-style modules (which is not guaranteed to happen) it's easy to replace the import.