FreeCAD News

It’s been a while since I post­ed a sta­tus update! Devel­op­ers have been meet­ing reg­u­lar­ly to make sure we are still mak­ing progress towards releas­ing 0.21 (you can see the release sta­tus page here). The main things we’re wait­ing on are two Topo­log­i­cal Nam­ing Prob­lem (TNP) pull requests, PR 9780 (clos­es issue 9116: TopoN­am­ing Phase 2 card 3 of 5 — Com­plex­Ge­o­Da­ta dress­ing) and PR 9696 (clos­es issue 9119: TopoN­am­ing Phase 2 card 4 of 5 — SketchOb­ject dressing).

Both of those PRs are in active devel­op­ment, with an ini­tial suite of tests writ­ten, and the code from the orig­i­nal TNP pull request incor­po­rat­ed into the two class­es being looked at in those issues. If you are inter­est­ed in help­ing out, there are many more tests to write, either before or after the PRs are merged! Drop me a mes­sage if you are inter­est­ed and I’ll bring you up to speed (chennes@freecad.org). You don’t need to have a deep under­stand­ing of the TNP or the class­es involved, though some expe­ri­ence with C++ devel­op­ment will be help­ful. There are sev­er­al of us work­ing on the prob­lem who can help you learn the ropes as you go.

Once these two class­es are merged into FreeCAD’s main code­base, we will make a 0.21 release of FreeCAD. The TNP will still be a prob­lem in that release, but the ground­work for solv­ing it will have been laid (and you’ll get access to all of the amaz­ing things devel­op­ers have been doing for the last year!). After that release, we will begin acti­vat­ing the new TNP mit­i­ga­tion code, which will like­ly result in some tem­po­rary slow­downs and sta­bil­i­ty issues in the dai­ly and week­ly devel­op­ment builds. We are going to encour­age most peo­ple to use 0.21 as your “dai­ly dri­ver” and only use the devel­op­ment builds to help test the new TNP code (and be aware that things might break — back up those models!).