blog.librecad.orgLibreCAD - 2D Mechanical drawing

LibreCAD Blog about LibreCAD, an Open Source 2D CAD program SearchHome Post navigation ← Older posts Stable LibreCAD 2.2.0 released Posted on December 17, 2022 by LordOfBikes 8 Finally, here it is! It took far too long to present this new stable LibreCAD version. Already announced several times, new obstacles kept appearing. But the main cause, however, is the loss of manpower in recent years. We no longer have the resources to maintain a stable and a development branch side by side. In addition, there were many problems in our parallel project libdxfrw , which we also take care of. And there are also many invisible tasks to be dealt with, such as moving to a new cloud server, a new homepage, looking for financing our expenses, to name just a few. About 4800 commits have been made since the last stable version 2.1.3. Too much to go into detail. So here are a few notable changes in the new version 2.2.0: many causes of crashes have been eliminated eliminated DWG issues in libdxfrw, which caused several crashes the performance of panning and zooming in large files has been significantly improved the undo/redo engine has been completely revised due to several problems adjustments for new compiler and Qt versions were required extension of the command line, multi-line commands, paste and open command files improvement of the print preview, with tiled printing and line widths adjustment multiple selection and bulk actions in block and layer lists By expanding our CI , we can now easily provide up-to-date binary packages that allow many users to easily test and bug hunt on Windows, MacOS and Linux. The new release also has an online manual which is hosted at Read the Docs . This new stable version 2.2.0 finally replaces the previous stable 2.1.3. Unfortunately, we have to disappoint people who are hoping for a soon release of LibreCAD 3. It is still a long way from productive use. Also there are still many contributions available for version 2.2 we wont waste. These can now be integrated into an unstable development branch. That means there will probably be one or two more feature release 2.2.x. There may be LibreCAD 3 releases in parallel in future, but for the time being, not with the features that LibreCAD 2.2 currently offers. At last, let me mention, that we recently resumed to accept financial contributions again. These are basically used to pay our expenses for hosting and domain services. This has become possible through OpenCollective and by GitHub Sponsors . Please, find the new release on Github: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/releases/tag/2.2.0 or SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/librecad/files/ Posted in Announcement , Development | Tagged official release 2.2.0 | 8 Replies Future automatic releases in LibreCAD3 – Final Report: GSoC 2022 Posted on September 10, 2022 by Cristian Bezerdic 3 Hello everyone! This week is the last one for GSoC22 and I’m here to announce to you all the progress done in my project. You now can download LibreCAD 3 in windows and Linux! Thanks to GitHub Actions and several changes to the codebase, when entering in any Librecad3 builders” run in the actions tab of my clone of the repository, for example, this last one ( https:// github.com/CRiSTiK24/AddCI-CDLibreCAD_3/actions/runs/3003305310 ) you will find as artifacts installers or packages for Windows and Linux. What is new? I’ve moved this part to https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD_3/wiki/Installation . As a summary on the current status, the artifacts are available as artifacts in my own repo at the Github Actions tab, and once it gets merged, in the main repo tab. Also, since LibreCAD3 is unstable, I’ve considered that i’d be better to not put it in the snap store. Next, I’ll provide a list of the different technologies I’ve learned during my project, and some links to my work ( dev log, wiki, etc ). Tools used: CMake/CPack: We were taught to use GCC at university, yet Cmake is another kind of beast. At first, I was hesitant about how overcomplicated the CMake files and command line arguments looked, yet little by little I began to appreciate how many tools it was integrated with (the snap, appimage, and cpack were able to automatically deploy into the install folder without much complication). Also, once I started messing with the interactions and different directories in C++, I saw how easy was to add a library without having to put in the C++ file the exact location of it. C++Qt: C++ is the main programming language taught at my university, but still there was a lot of new keywords and code structure that was totally new to me. Either if it was External”, or the newclass : inherited class”, I had to try many times different combinations of code until one of them worked and let me understand the logic of that file. Meanwhile, Qt was well documented, and other than the huge collection of types and functions (There is really a necessity for that many strings) it was quite fast to figure it out since I didn’t have to modify code related to the GUI. System call tracers and debuggers: At university, we aren’t taught how to use them, so my usual method used to be lots of prints() everywhere. However in a project this huge, It would have been impossible to detect missing files of the package without the call tracers (strace in Linux). Also, the debugger allowed me to have a way to set the absolute path to the exe from the Graphical subdirectory using Qt Methods to the other subdirectories. Without using the Visual Studio Debugger it’d have been totally impossible to find the way. GitHub Actions and Snapcraft YAML: Though its indentation made me have to rewrite the code more times than I’d have liked, It wasn’t much different from a regular bash/batch file with some special way to pass the arguments. What I found harder was the way to use GitHub Actions variables. Foreign actions like Checkout set some helpful variables like the path towards the cloned repo, still, in the documentation, there were many ways to access it, but only the way it’s right now worked for me. Bash and Batch: We were taught the basics in the university, so it didn’t feel very strange. It was mostly planning on the more effective way to get a tool (like visual studio compiler) that would last. Thanks to GitHub actions I was able to get tools like Qt from a foreign action, instead of having to use a strange URL that could disappear in little. Conclusions: I’ve certainly learned a lot this summer. One of the things that I will remember is how many posts with similar issues to the ones I faced were on the internet and how many of them remained unanswered or used a workaround that didn’t work for me. It made me think of how much of the big software that we regularly use and consider rock solid is probably much more fragile than we really think. The other one is how entering through an opportunity presents many more. At the GSoC summit at the beginning of the summer, we were presented with Google Developer Student Clubs. There weren’t any in my city so I took the opportunity and this year I’ve been selected to begin a chapter at my university. At the same time, I began taking my LinkedIn seriously, and it made me receive a message to participate in a week-long Huawei formation called Seeds for the Future”. There are some ideas that I wrote in the original proposal that I’ve not implemented because I thought they wouldn’t be a good idea. The main example is uploading every snap to the snap store automatically. Since LibreCAD3 is still experimental software, I thought that if someone was using a functional snap they wouldn’t want an automatic update to break their version just because one of the devs tried out a new change. Also, the proposal had some extra steps for testing, though after being involved with the building of the snap and appimage I’ve seen that they are so hard to get built that just getting...