Ubuntu Daily Builds PPA now using OCC 7.1.0

[NormandC]

Hello,

For anyone who hasn't followed our progress here, this week we switched the Daily Builds PPA from using OCE 0.17 to Open CASCADE (OCC) 7.1.0.

OCC / OCE (Open CASCADE Community Edition) is a CAD development platform, it is used by FreeCAD for its geometric modeling kernel.

The reason for this switch is that OCE development has been mostly stalled for the past 2 years. OCE 0.17 (the latest version available in the Ubuntu repositories) is based on OCC 6.8.0 released in November 2014. Moreover, OCE 0.18 released in January 2017 is still only based on OCC 6.9.1. OCC 7.1.0 contains tons of bug fixes, and it is also required to leverage all the latest stuff in the FEM workbench.

A nice consequence of this is that the Boolean Fragments tools from the Part workbench are now available (they require OCC 6.9+). They're useful for FEM.

This change required that we temporarily disable netgen because the old v4.9.13 version from the Ubuntu repositories conflicts with OCC 7.x. (netgen is one of two tetrahedral mesh generators available in FreeCAD).

We will work to package newer libraries for the FEM workbench: netgen 5.3.1 and VTK 7. Hopefully we can implement them soon.

This work wouldn't be possible without the help of the FreeCAD community (sgrogan, looo, vejmarie, blacey, bernd, gdo35 - sorry if I'm forgetting anyone!). Big thanks to you guys!

- NormandC for the FreeCAD Maintainers team

@ mods could this be pinned at the top for the time being? Thanks!

[bejant]

@NormandC and all: You bet I find it useful and thank you all again again for your diligence!
(I posted here because it seems more appropriate and to avoid further hijacking of the other topic)

[triplus]

Sounds good and thanks for investing effort in this area.

[Chris_G]

So many thanks to all members involved in this packaging work.
I keep in mind that a lot of hard work is hidden behind my simple "sudo apt upgrade".
Thanks a lot, guys !

[jmaustpc]

@ mods could this be pinned at the top for the time being? Thanks!

your request is granted.

Thanks everyone involved.

[abdullah]

It is indeed great! Thanks a lot to all for investing your time in it.

[m42kus]

This change required that we temporarily disable netgen because the old v4.9.13 version from the Ubuntu repositories conflicts with OCC 7.x. (netgen is one of two tetrahedral mesh generators available in FreeCAD).

We will work to package newer libraries for the FEM workbench: netgen 5.3.1 and VTK 7. Hopefully we can implement them soon.

Hey NormandC,
I'm the maintainer of freecad-git for arch linux (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/freecad-git/) and also recently switched to OCC 7, specifically to OCC 7.1.0. I already use netgen 5.3.1 for some time but I wasn't able to build it against OCC 7.1. The only version of netgen that built successfully was the master branch of the netgen project which isn't supported by freecad... Have you hand any success with this?

[NormandC]

Hi m42kus,

netgen 5.3.1 needs to be patched. The guys packaging the MacOS X builds came up with a working patch. For Ubuntu we're basing our package on it, see our coordination topic:

Latest patch: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 00#p165769

Further info on what options to compile with starting here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 90#p164833 (On Ubuntu we need to use C++11)

Sorry for the high noise ratio, I'm really just an end user fumbling through this...

FYI for much more expert help than I could provide, blacey is the man. He's active on the FreeCAD Gitter. (If you prefer IRC there's a Bot that syncs both channels)

[m42kus]

Hi m42kus,

netgen 5.3.1 needs to be patched. The guys packaging the MacOS X builds came up with a working patch. For Ubuntu we're basing our package on it, see our coordination topic:

Latest patch: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 00#p165769

Further info on what options to compile with starting here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 90#p164833 (On Ubuntu we need to use C++11)

Thanks a bunch for the reference. The freecad-git package on arch now includes support for netgen

[Kunda1]

Thanks a bunch for the reference. The freecad-git package on arch now includes support for netgen

Beast!