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Comment by Already__Taken | Hacker News Reader

I tried this a couple of months ago, I found what it's trying to do very pleasant to use but the tooling around it is very annoying. The up-to-date version 2 isn't on pypi, conda is thoroughly unpleasant to have as an environment. There seems to be a drive to using it inside it's own editor https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor while nice seems like wasted engineering effort in developing an editor when the language needs so much work. I didn't have much success structuring cad into modules as they wouldn't import well.

The point IMO of parametric cad in an existing language is to use the ecosystem. Lots of choices in this project make that really hard.

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Fully agree that the tooling and setup are not ideal. In case this may help others, I've been using Jupyter-CadQuery [0], an extension for JupyterLab to view your models in a side panel within the Jupyter notebook web interface. There's a docker image that packages the whole thing (CadQuery + JupyterLab + the extension) in the docker folder, making it easy to run and to update. The image is also available from docker hub [1].

On a more general note, I've mostly been using CadQuery to model pieces for 3d printing and the experience has been quite fun. Errors are not always easy to figure out and there's a learning curve to consider, but being able to "simply" describe my model in code instead of relying lots of [point|drag|click] is totally worth it. It was also a nice way to refresh my geometry knowledge.

[0] https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery [1] https://hub.docker.com/r/bwalter42/jupyter_cadquery

Yeah, I think their approach to blaming PyPi for not being able to distribute their 1GB standard install is really putting the blame on the wrong people.

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/issues/153#issuecomment...

As an example of an approach that doesn't break Pypi, nltk distributes through Pypi but has an download() method for installation.

https://pypi.org/project/nltk/ https://www.nltk.org/data.html

The fact they're hostile towards pip (and ergo pipenv and poetry) just make it less than appealing software to want to use.

1GB is huge for PyPI. In this kind of situations, is there a good way to provide a PyPI install while providing a secondary channel to download the massive assests? Say that I was distributing a project that relies on a few large binaries, and still want it to be pip-installable, what would be the best way to do that?

I actually found it fairly intuitive to use for an admittedly simple use-case, but I agree with you on CQ-editor being sub-optimal. The docs could have provided an example of displaying / saving assemblies to popular image formats

> conda is thoroughly unpleasant to have as an environment.

Understatement, if there ever was one.

Installing conda will maim your system irrevocably.

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