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!