On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Csaba Nagy <[email protected]> wrote:
> I played around some with the python-brlcad project, good work !

Thank you. There's still a lot of work to do to get it to the quality
that most python users expect of their libraries. There are a bunch of
abstractions around CAD modeling that are not present in
python-brlcad, mostly because I haven't been able to fathom the
correct simplified models yet. There should, at the very least, be
generic primitives that have generic intersection/union/other set
operations available, and they should probably share the same
subclasses that, somehow, resolve to the current symbols that
python-brlcad exposes.

> I have a few additions and some topics to discuss, I wonder where (what
> forum) and in what form would be the best to go ahead ?

I prefer this mailing list for discussion (until Christopher kicks us
out :-)), and the python-brlcad issue tracker for specific bug
reports.

>  * specify a custom installation directory for the wrapped brl-cad
> libraries (possibly passed as parameter to the setup script);

Have you considered virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper? I don't think
this is inside scope for a BRLCAD wrapper; there are a bunch of
up-the-chain abstractions in python for package management stuff.

>  * add libged to the wrapped library list;

There are a bunch of dependency issues that I ran into when I added
libged to the default list of modules to pythonize in the
bootstrapping script. I am confident that they are solvable, but I
haven't solved them yet. The post-install script is really gnarly at
the moment and could use some generic refactoring, like making the
number of variables for tracking paths to be, uh, less.

>  * add higher level python classes to experiment with a somewhat
> different approach of building geometry, where structure and positioning
> are separated as concepts: geometry is described only using structure
> parameters (lengths, radii, angles - no points in space !) and
> positioning is described by resolving constraints between objects (or
> between well defined points on them);

I agree with everything here, except for the resolving constraints
aspect; there's a module in brlcad somewhere for constraints and it
either isn't working or doesn't completely exist. I would definitely
prefer that constraint solving be delegated to the actual brlcad
engine stuff.

>  * thoughts about writing the python equivalent of mged, where python
> replaces tcl - in my opinion that would really boost geometry scripting;

Sounds good to me; but small caveat, it looks like the built libraries
will still have tcl in them even in the case of a python interpreter
for scripting up geometry. I think long-term the plan is to remove tcl
dependencies from the core library but don't quote me on it.

> I didn't check out yet the git sources, but if that's necessary for
> sharing code, I will do - just that I have absolutely no experience with
> git, so not sure how this process works.

Welp, best way to start is to clone the repository and dive in:

git clone https://github.com/kanzure/python-brlcad

You might be interested in trying git out here (note that it's an
interactive tutorial, and at the top it has instructions for the next
command to investigate):

http://try.github.io/

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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