Dear all, I'm pleased to announce that I just tagged the very first pre-0.6 release known as "0.6-alpha".
The previous pythonocc stable release (0.5) is two years old. Did the pythonocc projet sleep for two years? Not really, here is what happened, and what is going to happen from now. 1. Dependency upon OCCT pythonocc used to depend upon the OpenCascade library or OCCT (for instance, 0.5 release was based upon OCCT6.3.0). This appeared to be a strong and dangerous weakness : when OCCT moved up to newer releases, older downloads were not available anymore. Furthermore, it was not clear at all about the OCCT roadmap, release plans etc.: developing a python wrapper upon something that is moving into uncertain directions is not an easy task. Despite many requests from the OCC Community, things did not change. pythonocc definitely needed something more open to survive: the OCE project. 2. OCE history OCE (Opencascade Community Edition) is a community fork of OCCT. It was started in April 2011, just a couple of months after pythonocc-0.5 was released. The idea is simple: provide a place where to share bug reports/patches/improvements to OCCT and easy downloads. Some highly C/C++ skilled people joined the project: the OCE team managed to fix many bugs, improve code quality and, most important, to bring portability improvements. It's quite easy now to build OCE on most platforms (including Win32/64, Unices, OSX) thanks to the use of cmake. In order to react to this community fork, the OCC company set up a "community dev portal" ( http://dev.opencascade.org/), with an issue tracker and a git repository. They offer OCE devs to join their efforts: unfortunately, because OCC expected a CLA to be signed and because of the OCC licence which is not OSI approved, most (all?) of us refused to sign the CLA and become an official "OCCT". developer. There's not any contact anymore with the OCC company. OCE lives its own life. Whenever a new version of OCCT is released, we take, apply the set of OCE patches and release a new version. OCE source code is hosted at github ( https://github.com/tpaviot/oce), downloads at googlecode ( http://code.google.com/p/oce-binaries/). The latest OCE release is 0.11. OCE-0.11 is binary compliant with OCCT-6.5.4 latest release. 3. pythonocc development In the meantime, two major events occured on the pythonocc side : - the development moved to github, because git rocks. Just after the project moved away from googlecode, google decided to offer a git service to hosted googlecode project. Too late. The source code is now available at https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc - pythonocc moved from the python distutils package to the cmake builder. It's (supposed to be) quite easier to maintain and to use. 4. the changelog As a consequence, pythonocc-0.6-alpha brings two major improvements : - the support for OCE-0.11 - a new cmake builder system 5. and now? Here is the plan before 0.6 release : - empty the issue list ( https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc/issues?direction=desc&sort=created&state=open ) - add support for native OSX Cocoa (I won't ever release again some OSX/X11 stuff, it's such a mess to get a proper modern gui working). This is an ongoing work which is almost achieved - merge your patches if ever you suggest any change. What I expect from you if you want to help : - don't request any new feature. Of course, you can bring new features. - report unittest results, compilation issues etc. I especially expect feedbacks from windows 32/64 users (my win tests rely on a poor winXP virtual box vm). - share patches that can easily be merged into the master dev branch. Links : ===== Some precompiled binaries are available at http://code.google.com/p/pythonocc/. The issue tracker : https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc/issues The tar.gz source code : https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc/archive/0.6-alpha.tar.gz The .zip archive source code : https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc/archive/0.6-alpha.zip Happy New Year and Best Regards, Thomas
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