Contributing back; Qt samples support for Qt6 and cmake-only sample build system.

[gsegon]

Hi all,

I'm looking for ways to contribute back to upstream FOSS projects I use for my work and would like to get involved with OCC development to some degree. Do you have any areas where you'd like some help?

On another, but somewhat related topic, I've been going through the inner workings of OCAF and it's Function Services recently and one thing that popped out was that the samples/qt don't support Qt6. Would you consider upgrading them to Qt6? In addition, the build system for the samples/qt at the moment uses bash and batch scripts with build logic made in a couple of different files. Would you consider an approach to simplify it to have only cmake build configuration in the future? Something like: gsegon/FuncDemoOCC-Qt6.

Best regards!

• G

[dpasukhi]

Hello. Thank you for your desire to help.
OCCT's Samples are on my plan list to migrate into separated repos. And then use "samples" folder as a storage of references into community and OpenCascade repository which used OCCT inside.
So, QT samples are interested, for sure, to update. But also you personal projects are a part of "samples" also :) We would be happy to collect it into list later.
As for a collaboration, updating QT samples is low priority for us. OpenSource CAD kernel have a hundreds of awesome opensource QT projects to use as a reference :)
But it is also a good initiative to update the official samples. QT 6 is one of the possible improvements, that we don't mind. At the moment, QT 4 and QT 5 are supported for QT samples and Inspector.
If you would like to know the priority - then Inspector is the most critical QT sample which would like to have porting. The repo: https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/Inspector That project used for debug DE processes and used not only as a sample, but as a development tool.
_
As for a highly priority collaboration, it is for sure CAD kernel functionality, where we have plenty of places to improve :) And we welcome any commitment in that direction.

[gsegon]

Alright, thanks for the feedback. In that case I think I'll first have a look at the Inspector to provide support for Qt6 as I'd like to use it myself anyway. I've also encountered a few bugs that I could try to fix in it along the way.

Ultimately, I'd also like to contribute to the CAD kernel, but will start slowly with low-priority items at first and build from there.

[gsegon]

Hi again,

Took some time to familiarize myself with Inspector and managed to get it working with Qt6 with very little changes required.
I'll add the Qt6 support related changes and open up a PR soon. Still need to test it on Win.

Unrelated to Qt6 support, I did also significantly refactor the build system, added cmake install and find_package support with somewhat better targets modularity and removed a lot of, for me at least, dead weight code. I intend to use Inspector heavily in the upcoming months so I did this primarily for personal benefit although I'd have no issue to contribute it back to official repo if you'd like. The refactoring is significant though and coding style deviates probably too much. Nevertheless, you can have a look gsegon/Inspector/tree/initial-build-config-restructuring.

The Qt6 support PR will be without all of the major refactoring of course. I think it's only around 5-6 files that need minor changes.

Best,
~G