The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out

We’ve just pub­lished builds of the first release can­di­date for FreeCAD 1.0. You can down­load them here.

So far, we’ve enjoyed the con­tri­bu­tions of users who are hap­py to be liv­ing on the edge with our week­ly builds and report­ing what­ev­er bugs they run into. That real­ly helped us make the prover­bial edge less edgy.

The inten­tion behind mak­ing release can­di­dates is to give them into the hands of a dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ic — users who usu­al­ly stay away from unsta­ble soft­ware yet are hap­py enough to try very near­ly com­plete soft­ware and report issues they come across.

We are cur­rent­ly down to just 7 release block­ers, but we expect that the release can­di­dates will bump that num­ber up a tad, and that’s a good thing. While we des­per­ate­ly want 1.0 out, deliv­er­ing a real­ly sta­ble release is a big deal for us.

So please down­load the RC1, try it on a real project if you can, give it some real­ly hard time if you must, and report any bugs you see to our issue track­er.

If you are a devel­op­er who is inter­est­ed in con­tribut­ing to the effort, come look at the list of reports, pick an issue that seems triv­ial to resolve, write a fix, and sub­mit a pull request. We have week­ly merge meet­ings on Mon­days to go through the queue of cur­rent­ly open pull requests. You are wel­come to join!