Slightly OT: So after reading this, I went and tried cadquery ... it's really nice, but it is very, very unfortunately tied at the hip with anaconda, which is a monstrosity. I'm not sure why they would tie such a ball and chain to an otherwise super nice CAD scripting tool. There is luckily a docker based solution [1] that cleanly lets you wrap and try the whole cancerous thing without it spilling all over your syste…
I haven't used anaconda, because frankly I assume adding any more python package management tooling will make an even bigger mess on my system, whether it's a good tool or not. But I have no experience with it, so I'm curious, what makes you so opposed to it that you call it a cancer?
I confess to having not kept a very detailed track of the headaches conda has caused me over the years, but here are my recollections:
- conda plain and simple failing to install with a cryptic error message after downloading multiple gigabytes of crap only to test a small piece of software. Back then (slow download / disk writes / CPUs), easily an hour wasted.
- conda ruining my existing pip install and silently overwriting apt-get managed packages.
- conda unilaterally grafting bash code in my .bashrc, a practice I find - to remain polite - distasteful, not to mention the (IIRC) creation of a giant turd of a repo in my home directory.
- conda, when used to run tensorflow based packages on my NVidia linux box completely wrecking the existing NVidia drivers installs to the point of it booting in "safe mode" or giving me a black screen.
- post conda install, some binaries didn't want to run anymore because conda-installed libs were newer.
However, I still find the notion of having to install 2 gigs worth of stuff on my machine only to try a simple CAD package for a few hours a rather offending proposition. Call me an old curmudgeon if you have to.
To be fair to the cadquery folks: they seem to have realized the issue and they now offer what looks like a somewhat self contained binary dowload of the cq-editor package [2].
Finally, I'll leave you with this, taken from the cadquery homepage itself [1] (note the use of the word "polluting" in there, looks like I'm not the only one feeling this way):
For those unfamiliar (or uncomfortable) with Anaconda, it is probably best to install Miniconda to a local directory and to avoid running conda init. After performing a local directory installation, Miniconda can be activated via the [scripts,bin]/activate scripts. This will help avoid polluting and breaking the local Python installation. In Linux, the local directory installation method looks something like this