Coin3D Team

[Bastiaan Veelo]

Dear fellow Coin users,

There is news regarding the maintenance of the Coin3D libraries. As you all know, Roy Walmsley has guarded over Coin since the code was released as Open Source, or rather thrown out on the street for anybody to pick it up. At that time, nobody was queueing up for that, and Roy was pretty much the only one to volunteer. I am glad for all the work he put into it.

In June we had a discussion about the state of the project [1]. Clearly, project maintenance needs more attention, and to safeguard the future of Coin3D we need more than one person with admin rights. Although that discussion did not have many posts, it has been viewed over a hundred times which tells me there is enough sentiment and interest in the continued well-being of the libraries. Instead of each stakeholder making its own fork and duplicating efforts and fragmenting the code, I hope we will be able to join forces and organise a team. (Of course we will still use bitbucket forks but there should be more people accepting PRs and keep the forks synchronised.)

Migration to github has been brought up, but the thing is that it involves work and unless somebody does the work, it won't happen. My personal view on this is that people investing time in long-time maintenance should be able to organise things the way they work best for them, but there are more important things to do first. As a first step, Roy and I will be transferring ownership of the repositories from the (fictitious) Coin3D individual to a new Coin3D team. Since Bitbucket does not support conversion of an individual to a team, this involves a bit of renaming and migrating. The good thing is that forks and pull requests will follow wherever the repository moves, so nobody will need to change a thing. And when the process is completed, the URL of the wiki will be exactly the same as before, so that the www.coin3d.org URL will continue to work and people need not update their bookmarks. Naturally, while we are doing the migration, things may not be where you expect them to be, but they will shortly. I will put up a notice on the landing page while the migration is ongoing.

Roy and I will start the transition today. After it is completed, I will be sending out invitations to contributors and users that I think have a stake in Coin3D. If you think you should be part of the team, please leave a note here.

To a fruitful collaboration,
Bastiaan Veelo.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coin3d-discuss/uGTEyqMj1Bg

[Peter Lama]

Hi everyone,

Great news! I am a contributor to the FreeCAD project, and I would like to help out here where I can as well.

Thanks,

Peter

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "coin3d-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coin3d-discus...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Bastiaan Veelo]

On Monday, September 25, 2017 at 1:57:57 PM UTC+2, Peter Lama wrote:

 

Great news! I am a contributor to the FreeCAD project, and I would like to help out here where I can as well.

That's great, Peter, thanks. At the moment we are having issues accessing the original account, and we are waiting for Support to come back to us.

Bastiaan.

[Bastiaan Veelo]

The transition is complete, Coin3D is now managed by a team!

https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/profile/members

I think everything is up and running and working properly, please let us know if you encounter issues.

Best regards,

Bastiaan.

[Lorenz L.]

That are very good news! I also would like to help the project, allthough my skills are quite limitated...
In my mind making all the libraries qt5 compatible is the most important step. Also there are waiting some important patches to be merged. It would be nice to work towards a qt5 release...

thanks for the hard work,
nice regards Lorenz

[Bruce Lacey]

This is fantastic news and a very laudable initiative!  Thanks!

[Bastiaan Veelo]

On 10/6/2017 12:30, Lorenz L. wrote:

That are very good news! I also would like to help the project, allthough my skills are quite limitated...

Thank you. We are all learners by doing, and skills can be developed. Where would you like to start? There are plenty of open issues that can be addressed.

In my mind making all the libraries qt5 compatible is the most important step. Also there are waiting some important patches to be merged.

Which patches in particular? I am lacking a good overview of PRs for 21 repositories... I think I commented on the most important ones. Is it possible in Bitbucket for a contributor to change the PR as a reaction to reviewer comments? It should be, but I don't know how.

It would be nice to work towards a qt5 release...

Yes, and reintegrate the CMake branch. I am currently porting our app to Qt 5.9.1. I'll be scanning the Quarter repository from grey.colorado.edu to reintegrate their work.  If you know of any other deficiency in Quarter or another lib regarding to qt5, let us know.

You were talking about your git fork of pivy [1], and merging it back and a possible move to github. I think the fastest way to reintegrate your work is creating pull requests to our Bitbucket repositories. If it is worth your time, you can consider moving over all official repositories to github (abandoning Bitbucket) but don't underestimate the amount of work involved. Everything should be functionally equivalent with wiki and documentation and commit history and issues and download section. The transition-period needs to be short and synchronisation dealt with. The www.coin3d.org domain would need to be updated, and nobody really knows who is paying for that currently.
Most probably it will be easier and faster for you to learn Hg. I can recommend SourceTree as a GUI to Hg and Bitbucket. Maybe there is a tool that can convert your git repository back to Hg, from where you can generate the pull requests.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/coin3d-discuss/lorenz/coin3d-discuss/uGTEyqMj1Bg/Aw7oHP9cAAAJ

Best regards,
Bastiaan.

[Tom Roberts]

I agree that Qt5 should be high priority. Indeed for me it's the only priority for Coin3D.

I support two physics applications that used to use Coin3D. I had been planning to migrate both away from Coin3D, as it seemed to be no longer supported; so this is very good news. One application has already been migrated to OpenGL/Qt5 because it was easy (the Geant4 team already did the heavy lifting). The second application would require a lot more effort, so I am hoping that Coin3D / SoQt will work with Qt5 soon.

Tom Roberts

[Bastiaan Veelo]

On 10/6/2017 16:58, Tom Roberts wrote:
>
> I agree that Qt5 should be high priority. Indeed for me it's the only
> priority for Coin3D.
>

[...]

>
> I am hoping that Coin3D / SoQt will work with Qt5 soon.
>

This is simple: The things that get priority are the things that people
like you and me decide to work on. We are all equal in that regard. If
SoQt is important to you, you are in the best position to add Qt5
support to it. The Qt5 porting guide probably explains everything that
needs to be done.

Personally I will not contribute to SoQt, but I'll be happy to review
and merge PRs.

Bastiaan.

[Lorenz L.]

> Most probably it will be easier and faster for you to learn Hg.

For me it's easier to work with git and github. But you are right, it is simple way too much work to get all the libraries to github... If coin on bitbucket is alive, I am fine with working directly on bitbucket. That is for sure the best solution!

> You were talking about your git fork of pivy [1], and merging it back and a possible move to github. I think the fastest way to reintegrate your work is creating pull requests to our Bitbucket repositories.

Yes, I will try to do that. But also pivy needs to be updated to qt5. So there is still some work to be done on this front. I will try to get this ready.
But before I can work on that I need a SoQt which works with qt5. Especially pivy needs a soqt-config which originally was created with autotools. CMake doesn't generate such a config yet....

> Thank you. We are all learners by doing, and skills can be developed. Where would you like to start? There are plenty of open issues that can be addressed.

I will try to get conda-packages of coin-libraries ready for qt5 and report about the problems. It would be nice if the masters would build without patching too much...
Once soqt, coin, simage are useable this way, it's time to port the viewers of pivy to pyside2 (qt5 python bindings)
Applying some of the patches and gathering all the branches is already a big step! Thanks for that work!


> Which patches in particular?
for coin: https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/issues/130/cmake-have_inttypes_h-implementation-issue
But I will look what else is needed to build with conda...

[Bastiaan Veelo]

On 10/6/2017 18:00, Lorenz L. wrote:

But before I can work on that I need a SoQt which works with qt5. Especially pivy needs a soqt-config which originally was created with autotools. CMake doesn't generate such a config yet....

I don't know what would be in that file, neither do I know pivy, but maybe they can use the same constructs as in https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/pull-requests/58/install-coinconfig-version-cmake and https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/quarter/pull-requests/6/use-coinconfigcmake-and

> Which patches in particular?
for coin: https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/issues/130/cmake-have_inttypes_h-implementation-issue

Done.

Bastiaan.

[mario....@gmx.de]

Bastiaan, thank you very much for your initiative and for promoting me to the Coin3D Team.

We are using Coin3D in a bigger commercial project and we always tried to share our bug fixes and changes. Our current setup uses the coin main library (built with VS 2013) with a custom hosting framework.

I don't know how much time I can spend for the Coin3D project, but at least I will try to have an eye on the open issues and pull requests.

Best regards,
Mario

[Lorenz L.]

> I don't know what would be in that file, neither do I know pivy, but maybe they can use the same constructs as in https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/pull-requests/58/install-coinconfig-version-cmake and https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/quarter/pull-requests/6/use-coinconfigcmake-and

This is a good idea. I tried it, but had to figure out pivy uses some flags not available from the cmake-configs. All in all these flags are needed:

coin:
--includedir  # -> /usr/include
--cppflags  # -> -I/usr/include/Inventor/annex -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -D_REENTRANT
--ldflags  # -> -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro
--libs  # -> -lCoin -lGL -lXext -lSM -lICE -lX11 -ldl -lpthread

soqt:
--includedir  # -> /usr/include
--cppflags  # -> -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -I/usr/include/Inventor/annex -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/include/qt4 -I/usr/include/qt4/Qt
--ldflags  # -> -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro
--libs  # -> -lSoQt -lQtOpenGL -lQtGui -lQtCore -lXmu -lXi -lCoin -lGL -lXext -lSM -lICE -lX11 -ldl -lpthread

Maybe pivy, or the configs can be ajusted to make this work...

[Bastiaan Veelo]

I had a look at this, and it gets messy. You mentioned "soqt-config",
which looks like it should be generated by CMake using
"soqt-config.cmake.in" [1] but I'm not sure it would contain all the
info you described. There is also "soqt.pc" [2], meant to be queried by
the pkg-config utility on Linux and Cygwin. Coin also had the home-baked
shell script "coin-config" [3] for querying files generated from
"coin.cfg.in" [4].

None of them seem to be working at the moment?

Bastiaan.

[1]
https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/soqt/src/788d47c185c867778d393bcd96c4ac529faee412/soqt-config.cmake.in?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

[2]
https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/soqt/src/788d47c185c867778d393bcd96c4ac529faee412/SoQt.pc.in?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

[3]
https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/src/2a6dfc265fcae801daa907b2823099ceece2e961/bin/coin-config?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

[4]
https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/src/2a6dfc265fcae801daa907b2823099ceece2e961/coin.cfg.in?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

[Lorenz L.]

Thanks for having a look at this.
For coin we simple run "configure" to generate the configs [1], [2]. I think it should be possible to do the same with soqt, but there I don't know how to run the configure only for the config. But as a workaround, I can simple build with both and install with cmake. But this way there is the need to update soqt's "configure" to qt5 [3].
It would be great if the cmake-config files would have the mentioned variables available. This would definetly solve these issues.

[1]https://github.com/FreeCAD/homebrew-freecad/blob/master/coin.rb#L53L59
[2]https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_Conda/blob/master/coin3d/build.sh#L14L17
[3] https://bitbucket.org/peterl94/soqt

[Lorenz L.]

I think using cmake will work for pivy to find necessary information about soqt and coin3d. But I will remove the options to install other gui frameworks than qt. quarter and soqt are working allready with qt5....

For soqt I have to use some special sources. Pulling sources from bitbucket leads to some "not found header" errors. Are there some submodules which have to be pulled?

[Michael Rilee]

I'll help out as I'm able. Coin3D has been critical to my Earth Science work over the past couple of years.

Mike

[R.M. Bianchi]

Hi everyone,

First of all, thanks a lot for reviving and maintaining the project!

Since a few years, I'm the maintainer of a quite large Physics visualization project within the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Our project, until now, relied on a local copy of the Coin and SoQt sources. We are now planning to use the official sources from Bitbucket and perhaps test Quarter. Hence, we will be able to collaborate at some level.

On the longer time, we also plan to try to move to Qt3D, to simplify our project and its maintenance: we use Qt in the project anyway, so using the new Qt3D module, instead of Qt+Coin+SoQt would simplify a lot of things. But that needs thorough testing and a lot of development, so it would take a while for us to migrate. In the meanwhile, Coin and SoQt will remain our choice.

Thanks again for all the effort and the time you devote to the Coin3D suite.

Regards,
Riccardo.

[Bastiaan]

(Just linking an old thread to a new one)

On Friday, October 6, 2017 at 6:00:15 PM UTC+2, Lorenz L. wrote:

> Most probably it will be easier and faster for you to learn Hg.
For me it's easier to work with git and github. But you are right, it is simple way too much work to get all the libraries to github... If coin on bitbucket is alive, I am fine with working directly on bitbucket. That is for sure the best solution!

 It looks like migration to github is more likely now than ever. https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/issues/178/migrate-repositories-to-git-version

Bastiaan.