Biosystems Engineering Blog (Posts about debian)

November and December Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science

Kurt Kremitzki — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 03:25:18 GMT

Hello again! This new year's update announces some interesting new beginnings for the FreeCAD project, though it's a little short since I got some much needed vacation time over the last two months.

OpenFOAM on One Core? Only 92 Hours! (for mipsel)

In November a strange bug was found in the OpenFOAM package which led to only one core being used during builds, even though the logs reported an N core build. In the worst case scenario, on the mipsel architecture, this led to an increase in build times from 17 to 92 hours! I did some troubleshooting on this but found it a bit difficult since OpenFOAM uses a bespoke build system called wmake. I found myself wishing for the simplicity of CMake, and found there was an experimental repo implementing support for it but it didn't seem to work out of the box or with a bit of effort. I wonder if there's any consideration amongst OpenFOAM developers in moving away from wmake?

Anyway, OpenFOAM ended up getting removed from Debian Testing, but thankfully Adrian Bunk identified the problem, which is that the environment variable MAKEFLAGS was getting set to 'w' for some reason, and thus falling through the wmake code block that set up a proper parallel build for OpenFOAM. So, unsatisfyingly, as a workaround I uploaded the latest OpenFOAM version, 1906.191111, with unexport MAKEFLAGS. It would be nice to find an explanation, but I didn't spend much more time digging.

So, to end on the good news, the newest bugfix version of the OpenFOAM 1906 release, from November 11th 2019, is available for use going into 2020!

Trip to FOSDEM 2020 and MiniDebCamp at the Hackerspace Brussels

It was a bit last minute, but I finally decided to attend FOSDEM 2020. I had balked a bit at the cost since flights from the US are around $900, but decided it would be an important opportunity for FreeCAD developers and community to get together and possibly do some important work. Thankfully, Yorik and other senior FreeCAD developers thought it would be a good use of the project's Bountysource money to cover the cost of one ticket, split in half between myself and sliptonic, a developer from Missouri. He focuses on the Path workbench and FreeCAD in CAM applications, an area I'm interested in moving into as I now have such machining equipment available to me through my local ATX Hackerspace. The three of us will be giving a talk, "Open-source design ecosystems around FreeCAD", at 11:20 on Saturday, so please come by and say hi if you're able to!

I'll be staying for a few days before and after FOSDEM, including attending the MiniDebCamp at Hackerspace Bruxelles on Thursday & Friday, interested in anything Debian/FreeCAD related, so I look forward to getting a lot of work done indeed!

Looking at BRL-CAD for Debian

Lead developer Mike Muuss works on the XM-1 tank in BRL‑CAD on a PDP‑11/70 computer system, circa 1980.

For the past several summers, FreeCAD has participated in the Google Summer of Code program under an umbrella organization led by Sean Morrison of BRL-CAD. BRL-CAD is a very interesting bit of software with a long history, in fact the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world still under development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC. It is inspired by the development ideas of the era, a sort of UNIX philosophy for CAD, made up of many small tools doing one thing well and meant to be used in a normal UNIXy way, being piped into one another and so forth, with a unifying GUI using those tools. Since it's made up of BSD/LGPL licensed code, it ought to be available as part of the Debian Science toolkit, where it may be useful for FreeCAD as an included alternative CAD kernel to the currently exclusive OpenCASCADE. For example, fillets in OpenCASCADE are somewhat buggy and unmaintainably implemented such that an upstream rewrite is the only hope for long-term improvement. BRL-CAD could potentially improve FreeCAD in areas like this.

It turns out a Debian Request for Packaging bug for BRL-CAD has been open since 2005. I plan to close it! It turns out there's already existing Debian packaging work, too, though it's quite a few years old and thus some adaptation still is required.

PySide 2 and KDE Maintenance in Debian

Recently, FreeCAD has been unbuildable in Debian Sid because of issues related to PySide 2 and the Python 3.8 migration. This is complicated by the fact that the upstream fix has been released but in version 5.14.0, which builds fine with Qt 5.14, although Sid currently has 5.12. Furthermore, the PySide 2 package itself isn't building at the moment either! Since FreeCAD depends on PySide 2 and Qt, and I use the Qt-based KDE as my desktop, it seems like taking on maintenance of PySide 2 is something I should do to get started in this realm. However, the Qt/KDE Team's packaging practices and tools are rather different than the ones I'm used to for Science Team packages. This makes sense: Science Team packages are very often a single Git repo, but Qt5 for example is really 44 Git submodules smushed together. As such, things are a bit different! Once I get things taken care of for the package, I will try to write up some notes to help others interested in getting started, especially since KDE packaging could use some help.

FreeCAD Sysadmin Woes Begone: DigitalOcean Sponsorship

I'm very happy to announce that the FreeCAD project is now among the many open source software sponsorships by DigitalOcean.

One of the first things I did when interested in FreeCAD was to try to take on the responsibility of maintaining the project's infrastructure, since that would free up time for people to work on FreeCAD itself. FreeCAD's 17 years old now, and some of our infrastructure stack is about as dated. However, it isn't easy to just move things, I had to get things up to speed first and try to minimize disruption, so it's been a slow process. I'll go into more details in a technical blog post on the matter after I've finished our migration, hopefully by the end of this month, including details on our new setup, with the goal of allowing people to get set up with a dev environment of our project tools so you can do some hacking on things yourself and help out if possible.

Thanks for your support

I appreciate any feedback you might have.

You can get in touch with me via Twitter @thekurtwk.

If you'd like to donate to help support my work, there are several methods available on my site.

Halloween Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science Work

Kurt Kremitzki — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 03:04:54 GMT

There's been a spooky amount of activity in the FreeCAD & Debian Science world since I last wrote! Because this update covers August, September, and October, I'll try to be brief and only touch on the key points.

Staging & Merging App::Link Functionality

The "App::Link" object allows lightweight linking of objects in a document and from external documents.

In August, a major milestone towards unified, mainline mechanical assembly functionality in FreeCAD was reached.

One of the core challenges in implementing assembly functionality is the problem of topological naming. In a CAD model there are topological entities, such as solids, faces, edges, and vertices. We must choose some algorithm to name them so that you can refer to relationships to make an assembly. A simple example would be two cubes, connected by touching faces. If a parameter in your model changes, and after recalculation, your "Face_N" is on the wrong side of the cube, your assembly may break, or not be what you are expecting. Without a good approach to topological naming, parametric FreeCAD models won't be robust to changes and recalculations, which defeats the purpose of parametric modeling.

Because this is such a difficult problem, progress has been slow. However, recently a relatively new FreeCAD developer, 'realthunder', put significant work towards this problem, with a solution finally on the horizon. Because it required major changes to FreeCAD's internals, the review and testing period was and continues to be lengthy.

The milestone in particular was merging of a large chunk of this code, referred to in short as "App::Link functionality". This diff is huge: +70,441 -14,562 lines of C++. You can read more about it on the pull request itself.

I only played a minor contributing role in this effort, preparing a short-lived staging PPA to provide a package for testers after the pull request was opened in July, but it's rather significant news in terms of the project and so worth spreading. Mechanical assembly is (no surprise) a must-have for mechanical engineers interested in FreeCAD, and it's considered by some to be the last remaining blocker for FreeCAD's 1.0 release.

Extra links: notes for code reviewers from the PR author, for the dedicated readers out there.

FreeCAD Python 2 removal in Debian Testing

The Python 2 removal in Debian Testing continues, and with it, FreeCAD's Python 2 package is gone. However, upon upload, several new build failures appeared on the i386, mipsel, and s390x platforms. Turns out there was a regression in dwz, a software I had never heard of before. I tried troubleshooting but unfortunately had FreeCAD drop out of testing due to the Python 2 removal bug filed against it.

Luckily, when I filed a bug against dwz, Matthias Klose and Tom de Vries helped isolate and upstream the problem, with Tom even bisecting the regressing commit in the upstream bug. Thank you, you two!

After adding a workaround to fix those build failures, the new Python 3-only FreeCAD package is on its way to Debian Testing.

FreeCAD Python 3 support added for Ubuntu 16.04

Qt 5 & Python 3 builds for FreeCAD have been available on Ubuntu 18.04 and newer and Debian 10 and newer platforms for some time now. However, Ubuntu 16.04 was problematic due to its old Qt version, which meant a Qt 4, Python 3 build had to be produced. This had been on the back burner for a while because when I initially attempted backporting the necessary packages, I encountered some friction.

However, since it's the last holdout Python 2 platform, I took another look at things to try to speed up the "py2ectomy". It turns out that the missing package needed for a Python 3 build, pivy, was failing to build because of "PIE hardening", a Debian security hardening flag. I had all such flags turned on, so I just had to disable that particular one to get things going.

So, Python 3 builds are now available for Ubuntu 16.04 in the FreeCAD Daily Builds PPA, and they will be coming soon to the stable PPA as well. A new bugfix release has been made for stable, 0.18.4, so I am working on that first, and the Python 3 package will come with it.

Netgen and Pybind11 Builds

Good news for users of FreeCAD's finite element modeling workbench!

Integration with Netgen, a mesh generator, has long been an optional but off-by-default build option for FreeCAD, due to packaging difficulties. However, since I have taken over things in recent years, I have finally gotten things to the state where we can turn this back on by default. As part of this change, I am also building FreeCAD with Pybind11 instead of Boost.Python, marking another milestone in managing FreeCAD's dependencies.

Since this may introduce bugs, I've started by making this change for all of FreeCAD's daily builds in the Ubuntu PPA, as well as the package currently in Debian Unstable. Eventually, this change may come to the stable PPA.

OpenCASCADE 7.4.0

An assembly of a single solid box replicated ~93,000 times. This test case is more than 10x faster in OCCT 7.4.0.

After more than a year of development (PDF warning), a new minor version of OpenCASCADE Technology (OCCT) has been released.

OCCT is the geometry & topology kernel of FreeCAD, and it is also a dependency for several related projects including Gmsh, IFCOpenShell, Netgen, and OpenCAMLib. New releases in OCCT generally herald stability and performance upgrades for core behavior. However, there are some breaking changes and so these improvements are yet to be seen.

For the time being, OCCT 7.4.0 packages are available in my OpenCASCADE PPA and by building the package directly from https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/opencascade.

OpenFOAM 1906

I uploaded the latest version of OpenFOAM, the toolbox for computational fluid dynamics. It's now available in Ubuntu 19.10, Debian Testing, and via the FreeCAD Community Extras PPA.

Gmsh 4.4.1

The latest version of Gmsh, a 3D finite element mesh generator, is also in Ubuntu 19.10, Debian Testing, and the Community Extras PPA. Thanks to Nico Schlömer for helping maintain this package.

Netgen 6.2.1905

This version of Netgen is only available via the FreeCAD Daily and Community Extras PPAs. Unfortunately Netgen has been stuck in the Debian NEW queue for over 8 months now.

GitHub Sponsors Program

I was accepted into the GitHub Sponsors program! GitHub is matching donations for the first year. Hopefully this helps fund my FOSS work, and FOSS work in general.

Thanks for your support

I appreciate any feedback you might have.

You can get in touch with me via Twitter @thekurtwk.

If you'd like to donate to help support my work, there are several methods available on my site.

Summer Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science Work

Kurt Kremitzki — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 04:47:23 GMT

Hello, and welcome to my "summer update" on my free software work on FreeCAD and the Debian Science team. I call it a summer update because it was winter when I last wrote, and quite some time has elapsed since I fell out of the monthly update habit. This is a high-level summary of what I've been working on since March.

FreeCAD 0.18 Release & Debian 10 Full Freeze Timing

The official release date of FreeCAD 0.18 ( release notes ) is March 12, 2019, although the git tag for it wasn't pushed until March 14th. This timing was a bit unfortunate as the full freeze for Debian 10 went into effect March 12th, with a de-facto freeze date of March 2nd due to the 10 day testing migration period. To compound things, since this was my first Debian release as a packaging contributor, I didn't do things quite right such that while I probably could have gotten FreeCAD 0.18 into Debian 10, I didn't. Instead, what's available is a pre-release version from about a month before the release which is missing a few bugfixes and refinements.

On the positive side, this is an impetus for me to learn about Debian Backports, a way to provide non-bugfix updates to Debian Stable users. The 0.18 release line has already had several bugfix releases; I've currently got Debian Testing/Unstable as well as the Ubuntu Stable PPA up-to-date with version 0.18.3. As soon as I'm able, I'll get this version into Debian Backports, too.

FreeCAD PPA Improvements

Another nice improvement I've recently made is migrating the packaging for the Ubuntu Stable and Daily PPAs to Debian's GitLab instance at https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/freecad by creating the ppa/master and ppa/daily branches. Having all the Debian and Ubuntu packaging in one place means that propagating updates has become a matter of git merging and pushing. Once any changes are in place, I simply have to trigger an import and build on Launchpad for the stable releases. For the daily builds, changes are automatically synced and the debian directory from Salsa is combined with the latest synced upstream source from GitHub, so daily builds no longer have to be triggered manually. However, this has uncovered another problem in our process which being worked on at the FreeCAD forums. (Thread: Finding a solution for the 'version.h' issue

Science Team Package Updates

The main Science Team packages I've been working on recently have been OpenCASCADE, Netgen, Gmsh, and OpenFOAM.

For OpenCASCADE, I have uploaded the third bugfix release in the 7.3.0 series. Unfortunately, their versioning scheme is a bit unusual, so this version is tagged 7.3.0p3. This is unfortunate because dpkg --compare-versions 7.3.0p3+dfsg1 gt 7.3.0+dfsg1 evaluates to false. As such, I've uploaded this package as 7.3.3, with plans to contact upstream to discuss their bugfix release versioning scheme. Currently, version 7.4.0 has an upstream target release date for the end of August, so there will be an opportunity to convince them to release 7.4.1 instead of 7.4.0p1. If you're interested in the changes contained in this upload, you can refer to the upstream git log for more information.

In collaboration with Nico Schlömer and Anton Gladky, the newest Gmsh, version 4.4.1, has been uploaded to wait in the Debian NEW queue. See the upstream changelog for more information on what's new.

I've also prepared the package for the newest version of Netgen, 6.2.1905. Unfortunately, uploading this is blocked because 6.2.1810 is still in Debian NEW. However, I've tested compiling FreeCAD against Netgen, and I've been able to get the integration with it working again, so once I'm able to do this upload, I'll be able to upload a new and improved FreeCAD with the power of Netgen meshing.

I've also begun working on packaging the latest OpenFOAM release, 1906. I've gotten a little sidetracked, though, as a pecularity in the way upstream prepares their tarballs seems to be triggering a bug in GNU tar. I should have this one uploaded soon. For a preview in what'll be coming, see the release notes for version 1906.

GitLab CI Experimentation with salsa.debian.org

Some incredibly awesome Debian contributors have set up the ability to use GitLab CI to automate the testing of Debian packages (see documentation.)

I did a bit of experimentation with it. Unfortunately, both OpenCASCADE and FreeCAD exceeded the 2 hour time limit. There's a lot of promise in it for smaller packages, though!

Python 2 Removal in Debian Underway

Per pythonclock.org, Python 2 has less than 5 months until it's end-of-life, so the task of removing it for the next version of Debian has begun. For now, it's mainly limited to leaf packages with nothing depending on them. As such, I've uploaded Python 3-only packages for new upstream releases of python-fluids (a fluid dynamics engineering & design library) and python-ulmo (provides clean & simple access to public hydrology and climatology data).

Debian Developer Application

I've finally applied to become a full Debian Developer, which is an exciting prospect. I'll be more able to enact improvements without having to bug, well, mostly Anton, Andreas, and Tobias. (Thanks!) I'm also looking forward to having access to more resources to improve my packages on other architectures, particularly arm64 now that the Raspberry Pi 4 is out and potentially a serious candidate for a low-powered FreeCAD workstation.

The process is slow and calculating, as it should be, so it'll be some time before I'm officially in, but it sure will be cause for celebration.

Google Summer of Code Mentoring

CC-BY-SA-4.0, Aswinshenoy.

I'm mentoring a Google Summer of Code project for FreeCAD this year! (See forum thread.) My student is quite new to FreeCAD and Debian/Ubuntu, so the first half of the project has involved relatively the deep-end topics of using Debian packaging to distribute bugfixes for FreeCAD and to learn by exploring related packages in its ecosystem. In particular, focus was given to OpenCAMLib, since there is a lot of user and developer interest in FreeCAD's potential for generating toolpaths for machining and manufacturing the models created in the program.

Now that he's officially swimming and not sinking, the next phase is working on making development and packaging-related improvements for FreeCAD on Windows, which is in even rougher shape than Debian/Ubuntu, but more his area of familiarity. Stay tuned for the final results!

Thanks to my sponsors

This work is made possible in part by contributions from readers like you! You can send moral support my way via Twitter @thekurtwk. Financial support is also appreciated at any level and possible on several platforms: Patreon, Liberapay, and PayPal.

My Free Software Activities in January & February 2019

Kurt Kremitzki — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 06:10:43 GMT

Intro

Hello all and welcome again to another of my monthly summary posts on my work in free software, with a focus on open engineering in Debian & Ubuntu. I'm fortunate to have the February 12th Debian 10 soft freeze deadline to scapegoat for my missed January update, and thanks too to February for being short enough to postpone it further and combine the two updates.

I've decided to go with a bit of a dryer chronological approach to this update as there's lots to cover. Worth highlighting, however:

Highlights

New Debian upload for a FreeCAD 0.18 pre-release
New Debian upload for OpenFOAM. An upstream switch from openfoam.org to openfoam.com and a different versioning scheme results in a massive version bump, 4.1 to 1812. That's over 1800 versions better. (Seriously though, it's about a 2 year bump in changes.)
New Debian uploads for mesh generation softwares Gmsh 4.1.3 and Netgen 6.2.1810 -- though Netgen might miss Debian 10? It's stuck in the NEW queue.
FreeCAD is participating in Google Summer of Code and I'm looking for a student to mentor

Timeline

January

Jan 6: Updated the FreeCAD bug tracker to the latest version.
Jan 12: Completed transition of FreeCAD PPAs to new versions of Coin3D & its Python bindings package Pivy, which resolved a major breakage caused by me on Dec 29 but was a necessary precursor to a FreeCAD 0.18 release; I just didn't execute it as well as I should have
Jan 16: Upload of OpenFOAM 1812.
Jan 18: Discussed on GitHub with the upstream of OpenCAMLib about release plans now that it is Python 3 compatible
Jan 19: Contact via GitHub issue with libMesh upstream about Debian packaging, with enthusiastic response.
Jan 19: FreeCAD pull request to fix Start Workbench behavior in Debian/Ubuntu since we can't include binary .FCStd examples, even though they're glorified ZIPs, for Debian Free Software Guidelines reasons (or can we? please contact me if you know otherwise)
Jan 25-27: Hosted Austin Debian Bug Squashing Party. Unfortunately, it wasn't very successful in drawing in people besides those already interested in Debian at the host venue, the ATX Hackerspace. I didn't want to over-advertise it since the venue was limited in capacity, which in retrospect was a mistake. Oh well, there was also plenty to learn for the next one. The following bugs were closed: 918479, 888026, 884092, 886538, 882510, 899099, 920525, 919711.
Jan 26: Announced the experimental staging.freecad.io, an instance of FreeCAD's homepage designed to test possible improvements to be had by moving away from shared hosting
Jan 28: Contact via GitHub issue with sfepy upstream about it failing to build from source to try to get help on issue potentially preventing it from being included in Debian 10.

February

Feb 4: Sponsored uploads of FreeCAD 0.18 pre-release and Gmsh 4.1.3 into Unstable, thanks Anton Gladky.
Feb 4: Announced tracker.freecad.io, an experimental instance of FreeCAD's bug tracker designed to test possible improvements to be had from moving away from shared hosting
Feb 5: Regained control of abandoned FreeCAD Snap, which was a pre-release of 0.17, by way of the uploader returning from MIA and adding me.
Feb 9: Merge PR for FreeCAD-Homepage repo to add Expires headers and unset ETags to try to get better performance
Feb 13: Confirmed sfepy upstream fix resolved the issue, but it came a day after the soft freeze preventing re-entry to Testing.
Feb 23: Upload of python-fluids 0.1.73, experiment with Salsa GitLab CI.
Feb 25: Google Summer of Code organizations announced. FreeCAD participating under umbrella organization OpenCAx led by BRL-CAD. I created a GitHub issue for the project I'd like to mentor. I'm looking for a student interested in improving the state of Debian & Ubuntu packaging for FreeCAD and its ecosystem of packages. Particularly -- not everyone's first encounter with FreeCAD is with the latest and greatest version. If someone installs an old version and has a bad experience with an easily fixable packaging bug, we should try to tackle that issue to not drive away people who are already interested, but get a bad impression.
Feb 25: Sponsored upload of Netgen to Unstable, thanks Anton Gladky. Netgen had to re-enter NEW because I made a mistake in the naming of the binary package, so I had to revise the package to make libnglib-6.2 (for the .1810 release) replace libnglib-6.2.1804.
Feb 25: Sponsored upload of pycollada which adds Python 3 support and a python3- package, so it has to pass through NEW again.
Feb 28: Upload of OpenCASCADE, revising the package to revert to the default 'opencascade' installation paths instead of 'occt' (a not-so-great packaging decision as OpenCASCADE was my 2nd ever Debian package)

Sponsorship

Verbal support by way of my contact info below is greatly appreciated, but if you want to help support my free software & open engineering work financially, I've made it easy with several options:

Patreon
PayPal
Liberapay
Wispay (cryptocurrency)

Any level of support is appreciated!

Contact

You can follow me on Twitter @thekurtwk.

I'm also now on Matrix, an open network for secure, decentralized communication, @kkremitzki:matrix.org.

Free Software Activities in December 2018

Kurt Kremitzki — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:19:53 GMT

Hello again for another of my monthly updates on my work on Debian Science and the FreeCAD ecosystem.

There's only a few announcement items since I was mostly enjoying my holidays, but several important things were accomplished this month. Also, since there's not much time left before the release of Debian 10, there's some consideration to be done towards what I'll be working on in the next few months.

gmsh bugfix; no gmsh 4 yet

At the beginning of the month, I uploaded gmsh 3.0.6+dfsg1-4. This had a patch submitted by Joost van Zwieten (thanks!) to fix Debian bug #904946 which was preventing gmsh usage in FreeCAD, as well as adding an autopkgtest to make sure that behavior remains.

New Coin3D transition; Pivy uploaded!

Near the middle of the month, Leo Palomo-Avellaneda, Anton Gladky, and I finished the transition for the coin3 package, which is a scene graph library and high-level wrapper of OpenGL. The new version is a pre-release coin3 4.0.0 which adds CMake support. It also fixes Debian bug #874727 which caused FreeCAD to segfault when importing an SVG. FreeCAD also uses pivy, a Python wrapper for coin, as a runtime dependency, and completing this transition has finished the last blocker for a Python 3 FreeCAD package, so thanks to Leo and Anton!

New release for med-fichier (not by me)

Another FreeCAD dependency had a new release this month, med-fichier 4.0.0. This software is developed by Électricité de France and built on the HDF5 library and file format but is specialized for mesh data. It is also a dependency of gmsh which introduced some difficulty for the gmsh package.

OpenFOAM upstream switch; from openfoam.org to openfoam.com

The final noteworthy item for this month was an interesting bit of correspondence I received concerning the OpenFOAM package. As I had mentioned in previous posts, the current OpenFOAM version in Debian is 4.x, and I had worked on updating the package for OpenFOAM 6.x. My packaging was working and complete last summer, but for an inexplicable reason it stopped building late summer, started building again for about a week in September, and then stopped again. I would really like an up-to-date OpenFOAM in Debian 10, and so when I received an email from the people at openfoam.com about packaging their version, I was very intrigued. You see, the version in Debian is currently from openfoam.org. Besides the TLD difference, there is a bit of history between the two versions, but for end users there should major difference. If you're interested in more background, you can consult this video by József Nagy.

Similarly, it seems likely that the OpenFOAM package will be changing over to the openfoam.com version soon. I've already succesfully built the latest OpenFOAM from this source, version 1812, and plan to submit it soon.

Thanks to my sponsors

Free Software Activities in November 2018

Kurt Kremitzki — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 05:20:10 GMT

Intro

Welcome to another of my monthly summaries on my work in the free software world. My mission is to make engineering and science available for everyone, and Debian, the Universal Operating System, is my weapon of choice.

I received some feedback on my last post that I made it seem I would be stepping away from my role maintaining FreeCAD and other packages on the Debian Science Team, which was an unfortunate miscommunication on my part. Mainly, I just would like to reduce the proportion of my overall free software time on it, from its current amount, nearly 100%, to a roughly even 1/3rd split between Debian Science, FreeCAD, and PostCAD. The latter is a promising personal project to make an OpenCASCADE-powered CAD extension for PostgreSQL, bringing support for CAD file formats, datatypes, and algorithms to the powerful Postgres ecosystem, similar to what PostCAD has done for geospatial analysis. This could serve as a backend for both FreeCAD in the short term, and in the long term, it could power a web-based version of FreeCAD, perhaps with some Django-powered middleware serving a REST API for some WebGL-based frontend.

So, besides summarizing my work this month, I also plan to give a synopsis on my Debian packaging, for both what's in-progress and on my wishlist. As you'll see, it's quite extensive. My hope is that by whittling away at both lists, my Debian Science work can focus more on maintenance of existing packages, and free up some time for other things.

Transition for coin3

Coin3D is a scene graph library and a fundamental part of FreeCAD. Unfortunately, it hasn't had a release since 2011, but development has been picking up recently, so it's likely that a release is not too far off. Even without a formal release, several improvements have been made including CMake support, so it's time to prepare a transition in advance of the Debian 10 release. Luckily, Leo Palomo-Avellaneda has taken the initiative of getting this transition started.

Currently, the new Coin3D package is available in Debian Experimental as we prepare the reverse-dependencies to build against it. For FreeCAD, we directly depend on Pivy, which are Python bindings for Coin. Pivy, in turn, depends on Coin and SoQt, which is a Qt GUI component toolkit library for Coin. A pre-release version of SoQt is also being packaged since, like Coin, CMake support has been added, as well as support for Qt 5.

Unfortunately, I've been grinding my gears on building Pivy against the new Coin and SoQt for a good part of this month, which is especially troublesome since FreeCAD's transition to Python 3 is blocked by the upload of a new Pivy, which I prepared earlier this year.

With any luck, I'll be able to help Leo finish the Coin and SoQt transition and have Pivy prepared in December.

Gmsh Update

Gmsh is a 3D finite element mesh generator with built-in pre- and post-processing facilities. It's also one of the main meshers used by FreeCAD's Finite Element Modeling Workbench, besides Netgen.

Currently Debian has Gmsh 3.0.6, but a new major version was released in August. I've already prepared this new major version for testing in FreeCAD's Community Extras PPA, but I hadn't cleaned up the packaging yet to submit to Debian. However, in November, there were two point releases, 4.0.5 and 4.0.6, so I wasn't able to complete this work this month, but I'm sure it'll be done in early December.

One major piece of information regarding Gmsh 4 is a change in the API: the libjava-gmsh3 package in Debian was never meant to be a public API, and so Gmsh upstream has requested that we no longer ship it. To offset this, there have been refinements for the actual public API, which officially comes in C, Python 3 and (new) Julia flavors. However, I haven't found much information on Julia packaging in Debian, so I'll likely hold off on that package.

PySide 2 Rebuild & PPA Plans

Since FreeCAD is an LGPL-licensed Qt project, we must use PySide and not PyQt to do Qt things with Python. Because of this, the FreeCAD migration to Qt 5 on Debian was blocked by the packaging of PySide 2, which was completed by Freexian SARL over the summer. In Debian, we now have a Qt 5-enabled FreeCAD, although our daily builds PPA is still using Qt 4.

Besides the Qt 4->5 transition, we're also finishing up a Python 2->3 transition. At the end of the summer I published a freecad-python3 package in the PPA which also used Qt 5. However, it wasn't really fully usable, moreso a proof-of-concept that such a build indeed buildable.

At this point, the Debian FreeCAD package has begun to diverge from the FreeCAD PPAs; besides Qt 5 builds not being available currently, the Debian package has also been split into several packages (e.g. libfreecad, freecad-common, etc. packages) in order to better comply with Debian Policy and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

So, there's a bit of work to do to catch the PPAs up. First, the package split needs to be done. Then, I need to upload an alternative freecad-daily package for Qt 5 builds, separate from Python 3. Once that is done and has undergone some testing, freecad-daily can be replaced by it, and it in turn can be replaced by a freecad-python3 package for further testing. Since FreeCAD's 0.18 release is imminent, I'll need to get this taken care of during December, so stay tuned.

Packaging in Progress

My first packaging list is all the software I've already started packaging. For some, it's almost complete, and for others, I've only just begun.

The purpose of these lists is not to give status updates, but to announce what all I'm interested in to anyone reading this, and to give an idea of how much packaging work I have in mind to improve this usage of Debian.

Biosystems Engineering Blog (Posts about debian)

November and December Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science

Halloween Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science Work

Summer Update for FreeCAD & Debian Science Work

FreeCAD 0.18 Release & Debian 10 Full Freeze Timing

FreeCAD PPA Improvements

Science Team Package Updates

GitLab CI Experimentation with salsa.debian.org

Python 2 Removal in Debian Underway

Debian Developer Application

Google Summer of Code Mentoring

Thanks to my sponsors

My Free Software Activities in January & February 2019

Intro

Highlights

Timeline

January

February

Sponsorship

Contact

Free Software Activities in December 2018

gmsh bugfix; no gmsh 4 yet

New Coin3D transition; Pivy uploaded!

New release for med-fichier (not by me)

OpenFOAM upstream switch; from openfoam.org to openfoam.com

Thanks to my sponsors

Free Software Activities in November 2018

Intro

Sponsors

Transition for coin3

Gmsh Update

PySide 2 Rebuild & PPA Plans

Packaging in Progress

cantera

Homepage, GitHub

coolprop

Homepage, GitHub

elmerfem

Homepage, GitHub

if97

PDF Standard, GitHub

ifcopenshell

Homepage, GitHub

ifcplusplus

Homepage, GitHub

opencamlib

Homepage, GitHub

openvoronoi

Homepage, GitHub

projectchrono

Homepage, GitHub

smesh

xcfem

Homepage, GitHub

Wishlist Packages

2geom

Homepage, GitLab

bimserver

Homepage, GitHub

cadquery

Homepage, GitHub

libreoffice-code-highlighter

Homepage, GitHub

lib3mf

Homepage, GitHub

muesli

Homepage, BitBucket

cling

Homepage, GitHub

dpkg-licenses

landlab

Homepage, GitHub

nikola

Homepage, GitHub

osifont

Homepage, GitHub

pigpio

Homepage, GitHub

piscope

Homepage, GitHub