Fornjot

It's been another good (if short) week! You might notice, I'm publishing this on a Friday, not as usual on a Monday. That's because as of now, I'm on vacation! I didn't want to delay the dev log for two weeks, so here we go with an earlier one.

I finally wrapped up splitting the Fornjot app into self-contained libraries (#141), an effort that has gone on for a few weeks now (with interruptions). After that, I initially planned to start preparing for the next release. But it came to my attention that exported 3MF files were not valid, so I decided to focus on that.

I managed to fix 3MF export (#451), as well as a display issue that had the same root cause (#339). I added validation of exported 3MF files in the CI build, making sure issues like this won't creep in again as easily (#54).

Meanwhile, @hendrikmaus has continued his tireless work on release automation (#104), which I'll hopefully get to try out for the first time in a few weeks.

Sponsors

Fornjot is supported by @webtrax-oz, @lthiery, @Yatekii, @martindederer, @hobofan, and my other awesome sponsors. Thank you!

If you're interested in helping to make the project sustainable long-term, please consider supporting me too.

End-user improvements

Improvements to Fornjot and its documentation that are visible to end-users.

• Fix triangulation edge case (#453)
• Fix 3MF export and display issues with transparent faces (#484)

Ecosystem improvements

Improvements to the Fornjot ecosystem that are relevant to developers who are building on top of Fornjot components.

• Extract fj-export from fj-app (#472, #473)
• Extract fj-viewer from fj-app (#474)

fj-host

• Add dedicated type for model parameters (#466)

fj-interop

• Rename fj-debug to fj-interop (#454)
• Move Mesh to fj-interop and clean it up a little (#456, #457, #459, #460, #462)

fj-kernel

• Add support for arcs (#483)

fj-math

• Remove color field from fj_math::Triangle (#458)
• Make Triangle::from_points more flexible (#461)
• Implement fmt::Display for Scalar (#464)
• Implement Neg for Vector (#482)

fj-operations

• Move ShapeProcessor to fj-operations (#467)

Internal Improvements

Improvements that are relevant to developers working on Fornjot itself.

• Update dependencies (#449, #450, #452)
• Clean up triangulation code (#455)
• Add Tolerance struct to enforce validity of tolerance values (#465)
• Continue automating release process (#468, #469, #470; thanks to @hendrikmaus!)
• Clean up directory structure in repository (#475)
• Validate exported 3MF files in CI build (#476, #480, #481)

Issue of the Week

People make mistakes. I make mistakes. Sometimes I don't notice them, and get bitten by them later. It would be nice to prevent that, by having a robot tell me how dumb I am, and that I need to be more careful.

If that kind of thing is interesting to you, why not take a look at #477 - CI build should fail, if crates are not part of workspace? This is the kind of thing that's not a big task for a newcomer, but can be very helpful going forward. (And if you're looking for more along those lines, there's also #478.)

Outlook

I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks! I might do some work during that time, but that will be completely governed by what I happen to be in the mood for. If that's something noteworthy, I'm going to publish a post-vacation dev log on May 2nd. If not, I'll be back with a regular one on May 9th.

Unless I learn about more critical bugs, my immediate priority after the vacation is going to be the next release. That will require a tiny bit of cleanup (READMEs, crate metadata, etc.), as well as a changelog and release announcement that will probably take days to write (I've waited too long).