kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have had an out-of-tree IGES/STEP 3D plugin based on OCE
for a few months now. I'd like to get this plugin into the main
branch but there are some OCE issues that need to be resolved
and which I'd need some help with:

1. Do we use only OCE or a choice of OCE or OpenCascade?

2. What is the availability of OCE/OpenCascade on the
different platforms and how do we ensure run-time linkage?
On Linux the run-time linkage is not a problem, but I don't
know how things work on OSX and Windows is a free-for-all
which may require us to build OCE for distribution to ensure
that everything works.

FreeCAD can use either OCE or OpenCascade so we can
use their FindOCE.cmake script as a starting point for
detecting OCE/OpenCascade.

I think Nick has managed to compile OCE with MSys2/MinGW
but I've had no luck.

If we have enough interested devs on OSX/Linux/Windows I
think we need to make up a small team to work on the OCE
issues so we can get the 3D plugin into KiCad. This is also
an important step towards realizing a STEP exporter.

I also expect other issues to pop up such as available
versions of OCE on different platforms/distributions
(some versions of OCE are actually unusable due to
fatal bugs) and various compiler issues (is c++11 supported
by the compiler or not, etc). This is why I created the OCE
plugin as a separate project rather than starting off as a
kicad branch.

Any comments/suggestions or devs who will volunteer to
be part of the team making this happen?

- Cirilo