New Beta OCP Wheels

[jmwright]

Thanks to a monumental effort by @bernhard-42 with the support @jdegenstein , we have a beta release of completely reworked cadquery-ocp wheels. There are now also cadquery-ocp-novtk wheels that do not depend on VTK. We would like to have some help testing these wheels. Below are the command lines needed to install the beta versions. Choose just one, you do not need to install both packages in the same environment.

VTK:

pip install --pre cadquery_ocp==7.7.2.2b2

No-VTK

pip install --pre cadquery_ocp_novtk==7.7.2.2b2

You can provide feedback on this discussion, or in the ocp-build-system issue tracker.

These wheels are designed to play better within the PyPI ecosystem. However, this comes with some limitations with the VTK-based wheels. Because of our PyPI dependency on VTK, fewer platforms and Python versions are currently supported than is ideal. It is very difficult to support all platforms that everyone wants, and to have our dependency chain do the same. I had attempted to maintain our own builds of VTK, but it introduced other problems, including compatibility issues for some users who were trying to run CadQuery in parallel with other software in the same environment. This situation should improve as OCP updates to newer versions of VTK.

I believe that @bernhard-42 has found the best path forward for now, and platform/Python version support should improve over time.