This setting is generally useful, but it especially shines when
assembling, since the "same orientation" and "parallel" constraints
remove three and two rotational degrees of freedom, which makes them
impossible to use with 3d "point on line" constraint that removes
two spatial and two rotational degrees of freedom.
The setting is not enabled for all imported groups by default
because it exhibits some edge case failures. For example:
* draw two line segments sharing a point,
* constrain lengths of line segments,
* constrain line segments perpendicular,
* constrain line segments to a 90° angle.
This is a truly degenerate case and so it is not considered very
important. However, we can fix this later by using Eigen::SparseQR.
This removes the arbitrary 64 byte restriction (which effectively
limits us to as little as 16 Unicode characters with CJK encodings),
makes classes smaller, and is easier to use.
As a consequence of making the length of all ex-NameStr fields
unbounded, all functions that returned a buffer derived from those
were changed to return std::string. Then, functions that are
contextually similar to the ones described above were changed
to return std::string. Then, functions that now happened to mostly
take an std::string argument converted to a C string were changed
to accept std::string.
This has produced a bit of churn, but is probably for the better.
What do we gain from this? Several things.
* First, usage of PATH_MAX (the POSIX constant) is eliminated.
PATH_MAX is actually a lie; Linux and OS X (and probably other BSDs
too) do not have an actual path length limit. Linux claims 4096,
OS X claims 1024, but it is trivial to construct paths that are
longer.
* Second, while Windows does enforce a limit of MAX_PATH (the Win32
constant) for its ASCII functions, the Unicode variants, when
used with UNC paths, do not have this restriction.
The capability to use UNC paths is useful by itself, as it allows
to access files on network shares directly.
* Third, representing paths as std::string will make it easier to
interoperate with *W WinAPI functions later.
This will allow us to use non-POD classes inside these objects
in future and is otherwise functionally equivalent, as well
as more concise.
Note that there are some subtleties with handling of
brace-initialization. Specifically:
On aggregates (e.g. simple C-style structures) using an empty
brace-initializer zero-initializes the aggregate, i.e. it makes
all members zero.
On non-aggregates an empty brace-initializer calls the default
constructor. And if the constructor doesn't explicitly initialize
the members (which the auto-generated constructor doesn't) then
the members will be constructed but otherwise uninitialized.
So, what is an aggregate class? To quote the C++ standard
(C++03 8.5.1 §1):
An aggregate is an array or a class (clause 9) with no
user-declared constructors (12.1), no private or protected
non-static data members (clause 11), no base classes (clause 10),
and no virtual functions (10.3).
In SolveSpace, we only have to handle the case of base classes;
Constraint and Entity have those. Thus, they had to gain a default
constructor that does nothing but initializes the members to zero.
The SolveSpace top-level directory was getting a bit cluttered, so
following the example of numerous other free-software projects, we move the
main application source into a subdirectory and adjust the build systems
accordingly.
Also, got rid of the obj/ directory in favor of creating it on the fly in
Makefile.msvc.
whitequark
EvilSpirit
ruevs
Daniel Richard G