[cad-linux] the state of open source CAD- my view

I am excited about what's happening in OSS CAD these days.  I see a lot 
of resources/libraries (opencascade, varkon, 
brlcad,vectorsection,etc...) available.  It also doesn't hurt that I am 
learning a bit of python myself and starting to use it for small tools 
to help me get my job done.  The more that I learn about linux and 
programming, the more things are starting to make sense. 

I know that a lot of you guys want a better gui for the open source 
offerings, but I am headed in a different direction.  I am trying to 
gear my work towards more automation in the design process.  
Scripting/programming tools are where it's at as far as I'm concerned. 

I think that Eric Wilhelm is going in a good direction with 
Vectorsection and all the small perl modules that help get things done 
for processing cad file formats.

I have used Varkon a bit.  I think that it's a good set of tools. I 
don't care for the gui, but with the MBS programming language 
underneath, one could automate a lot of tasks fully.  I was playing with 
using it totally from the command line with a few automated scripts, 
when I left it last.

Brlcad can be used to help create solids from scripts. Check out Sean's 
SGI cube script from the brlcad wiki. 

Thanks,
Dan

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