Except when you look at projects like FreeCAD, the lone developer forking the project (real thunder) has seemingly done more for the project than the original developers. A lot of this has to do with the fact that everything needs to be endlessly discussed on the FreeCAD forums before anything gets done. Considering the limited resources on the original developers hands, this is a recipe for stagnation and standstill. It is faster and simpler to just do the work and then merge the patches from the fork than to go through the official, slow and unproductive way.
Yeah sure very few people use realthunder's fork including me, but I have so far significantly benefitted from his work in the official FreeCAD release.
There are dozens of things that just need to be implemented and not pointlessly discussed in FreeCAD. The things I'm talking about are absurdly blatant and obvious to anyone. You know, things like a transparent preview of the operation you're doing. A sane attachment editor that doesn't choose a sketch orientation at random.
The negativity is necessary since the original developers are shutting valid criticism up with fake positivity.
Except they didn’t merge patches from RealThunder’s fork for TNP, for example. They used it as a guide and reference implementation and wrote a new implementation.
In general they do not just merge his work; they have to rewrite it. RealThunder is prolific but he evidently doesn’t use the same coding standards as the rest of the project, and makes changes across workbenches where he chooses for his own ideas, when in the core project they have other maintainers.
He has the total freedom to do this, and I agree his fork is illustrative of good solutions in some cases, but this is not a good way to just fix master. So they don’t.
Transparent previews in Part Design — and a general mechanism for them elsewhere - is coming in 1.1.
I notice you talking about the attachment editor choosing a random orientation a lot: in my experience it does not choose randomly, if you use an appropriate attachment scheme. I think I have rotated a sketch attachment once in my last two dozen or so uses, and that rotation was indicated by the design. The heuristic is complicated though, and the interface has several frustrations. There could be better UI for working through the attachment schemes.
1.1 has a change to core datums (Part Design-style LCS, datum planes, lines and points available throughout FreeCAD, not just in Part Design) that should make some of the more esoteric attachment schemes less often required, because you will be able to place an LCS once
Yeah sure very few people use realthunder's fork including me, but I have so far significantly benefitted from his work in the official FreeCAD release.
There are dozens of things that just need to be implemented and not pointlessly discussed in FreeCAD. The things I'm talking about are absurdly blatant and obvious to anyone. You know, things like a transparent preview of the operation you're doing. A sane attachment editor that doesn't choose a sketch orientation at random.
The negativity is necessary since the original developers are shutting valid criticism up with fake positivity.