Assembly3, A2plus, Assembly4? Get united!

[vocx]

You describe here nothing more than the common process of a community development and I admit that much in FreeCAD was developed that way.
But that's not the only way, as I have seen in some other places here; humans are capable of more. I wouldn't have started this thread if I had accepted that FOSS can only be developed that way. What you describe is an enormous waist of programming power, because two of three solutions are developed and may finally not be used.

I am extra picky today, blame the chorizo I had yesterday. It's not an enormous waist, it's a waste. An enormous waist only happens if you drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of cookies.

Anyway, I don't think it's a waste because as I mentioned previously, with the exception of A2plus, the other workbenches are very young, and are still being developed and tested by interested parties. There is nothing that clearly says there is a winner right now, and that we should be converging to a particular way of doing this. This is still being explored.

(I have seen people mention that they love A2plus and having separate files; and other people who say Assembly3 is clearly the way to go; and other people say that Assembly4 is the natural way things should go in an Assembly workbench. They all have merits.)

If we had set fixed (planned) rules for an assembly workbench in FreeCAD, then maybe realthunder would have never started work on Assembly3 and Link. Because this is free software, he had complete freedom to implement his ideas in a way that he wanted, and which not many people thought about, or had enough knowledge about. I think we can all agree that this unrestricted "evolution" has made FreeCAD better, as some of his ideas were merged with positive results into the main software.

...
After all I didn't want a meta discussion about different Assembly developments, I was hoping for a fruitful discussion about Assembly itself and how it should finally be.

The discussion is good, I just want to hit the breaks a little on the notion that "there are many ways to do (something), we are fragmented, and we should be converging to (one option)". I think we are still in a heavy development phase. So, we should be developing to see what sticks. We should talk and discuss as much as we want, but we should have that freedom to pursue what we feel.

I am personally against the notion that we should rush things and go "stable", and move into FreeCAD 1.0. That is occasionally mentioned by Bernd and triplus. I think we are far from that, as we still need to solve some fundamental issues regarding organization of FreeCAD as a community project, but also with regards to Assembly and all that. Enter FreeCAD 1.0 development cycle, name FreeCAD 0.91 instead of 0.20, means version after 0.19 could be 0.91

[vocx]

Talking about optimization strategies... Local optimization always has the potential to get stuck at one point. So some diversity is unavoidable to overcome such difficulties. In my eyes it's great to have 3 different approaches available. Now it should be rather easy to select which fits best into freecad, if different approaches should coexist and so on....

So in the end global optimization (like evulutunary and random processes) are necessary to overcome the problems not solveable by the more straight forward local optimization. ...

Thank you, this is my idea as well. It's the nature of free software, evolution. Evolutionary process.

[chrisb]

They are even now talking to one another and i hope more of this happens.

What exactly do you mean by this? What is the concrete example you are talking about?

See e.g. the third post in this topic.

[Mark Szlazak]

...
IMHO, generally there isn't anything particularly great with a dumb evolutionary approach over a intelligent coordinated communal approach. ...

Evolutionary strategies are great, introducing randomness is a great way to reach to solutions that nobody thought before. The very process of open source software is basically an evolutionary strategy in the software development world. Read again what looo says.

In fact the latter is slower with designs and produces results that aren't optimal.

I think you are contradicting yourself here. You said "latter", therefore you mean "intelligent coordinated communal approach is slower with designs and produces results that aren't optimal."

I thought you meant the opposite, that evolution is slower and sub-optimal.

Since there are only 3 people/groups working on these now, it is a good time for them to work with each other before more cooks jump into the kitchen.

The issue is you cannot force anybody to talk to each other. Each person will listen to whomever they want; there is no way to force this collaboration. It's wishful thinking, "they should talk". Well, sure, that's obvious. But still, every person will develop what they feel like, and what scratches their particular itch.

They are even now talking to one another and i hope more of this happens.

What exactly do you mean by this? What is the concrete example you are talking about?

I see several possible flawed assumptions on your part that lead to false analogies.

First, evolution as any biologist will tell you is a slow cumbersome process, that produces suboptimal but good enough results for survival and reproduction. These are not just random processes but also involve selection by the environment. As I said you have different basic “environments” where one approach uses parts that are copied and the other two that don’t. The consequences for survival are obvious.

Second, humans advanced culturally and technologically so rapidly and successfully over all other creatures because they learned to cooperate in large numbers. Going alone would have likely led to human extinction or some primitive state of development. Humans are considered as social animals which goes against the idea that they cannot cooperate. If they really can’t then that indicates lack of maturity or psychopathology.

You say there was no cooperation between ASM developers. I disagree, an example of cooperation is between the ASM 3 developer and the ASM 4 developer. They communicate in threads as we all can see but perhaps they could do more.

Now if your impression of evolution comes from evolutionary algorithms then this is about software running orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. So it only seems impressive but it is not because we are talking about humans working together to creat software and not about running some software.

[vocx]

I see several possible flawed assumptions on your part that lead to false analogies.
...

Blerg. I'm going to stop talking to you because you want to nitpick the meaning of evolution instead of dealing with the topic. Be pedantic then.

You say there was no cooperation between ASM developers.

I never said that.

[Mark Szlazak]

I see several possible flawed assumptions on your part that lead to false analogies.
...

Blerg. I'm going to stop talking to you because you want to nitpick the meaning of evolution instead of dealing with the topic. Be pedantic then.

You say there was no cooperation between ASM developers.

I never said that.

Glad you never said that. BTW, biological evolution is random mutation and natural selection (I.e, the environment of the organisms). That is Darwin’s theory and it is not just randomness which were ideas that came before Darwin and never worked. Creationists often make that same mistaking of thinking evolution works only by chance mechanisms/mutations.

[Petert]

Gentlemen (said in an AvE voice),

Somehow this turned into a dick measuring contest. That is totally not productive (when it comes to CAD software).

Differences are what defines a free society. Let people believe whatever they want, you can try to sway them to your point of view but you do not have to.

Let's focus on the subject matter, stop attacking each other and put the (waisted/wasted) energy in making FreeCAD better and the greatest.

AvE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6P ... 6lgGt3MyfA

[routalot]

I'm really new with assemblies of any sort in Freecad and I think the concept is really valuable and it has certainly allowed me to create some useful items.The transparency icon in A2plus is a greatly used feature and could I request it's wider adoption,including other workbenches?

One thing I haven't yet discovered is any form of associativity with updates to the original components.I have read the references to assemblies of hundreds,or even thousands, of parts and this would obviously make renewing an assembly a slow process in the event of a few changes and a total rebuild referencing all parts.

All in all I think we are not too many steps from making the transition from good to great and I thank the people who have got us this far.

[ColdAK]

I think the biggest worry and concern is wondering which one or ones will be around long term, not that there are multiple options. Options mean that one can go with what suits their personal preference best. For me, I use freecad for business and I actually would like the peace of mind that the method I use will still be supported years from now. For example, drawings I make today need to be valid or accessible with minimum tweaking to bring it up to date 10 years from now, I'm not really interested in spending hours drawing only to find out I have to redraw every project years from now. I still realise it is however, open source, and with that comes the flexibility to change things and break things.

[vocx]

... For me, I use freecad for business and I actually would like the peace of mind that the method I use will still be supported years from now. ...

Sure. It's free software, so the code is there for anybody to maintain and keep alive forever.

The problem, as you know is that you get what you pay for. You don't pay anybody for the software, then you can't expect much in return. If this is a deal breaker for you, then you shouldn't be using this system in the first place. Pay your dues to FreeCAD, sponsor a developer, and you can see this situation improving rapidly.