blog:Announcing the FreeSewing Library

We have just released FreeSewing v4.5. It’s a big release with a plenty of under-the-hood changes.

As usual, our changelog has all the details of what went in this release. Here, we’ll focus on the main item: The FreeSewing Library.

The FreeSewing Library

Ever since the release of version 3 of FreeSewing, we’ve supported the ability to freely combine different parts from existing designs as part of a new design.

It was – and remains – a good idea and a feature we absolutely want to support. But over time, we’ve seen that in practice, this can sometimes lead to problems:

• It takes careful design to ensure a part is created that can stand on its own without making assumptions about the design it is used in
• Pulling in a part from a design as a dependency often brings along a bunch of stuff of that design we are not interested in

People have also been extracting parts from designs that were never intended to be used outside of that design. This often required a bit of a hack to make it work, which saddles us with technical debt and code that is difficult to maintain.

So this created tension between the set of features we are committed to support, and the way those features sometimes were used which caused concerns about maintainability.

So, after some discussion on the matter, we’ve decided the create the FreeSewing Library. It is just another design named Library but it’s raison d’être is not as a stand-alone design, but rather as a Library for commonly used parts that are explicitly created to be re-used in other designs.

How does it work?

This works just the same as any other inheritance that we’ve been using before. It’s really just a matter of creating a growing body of ready to be reused parts which people can use.

That being said, we’ve made a bunch of changes under the hood to make sure this works in a way that is elegant. Such as allowing to reuse a part more than once with different settings, or the ability to scope design options to a specific part, rather than to the entire pattern.

Inheritance is here to stay

This does not mean that it is now bad to inherit parts from designs that are not the library. In particular, extending blocks into more fully featured patterns is not going anywhere.

What we wanted to avoid is a growing number of ad-hoc dependencies that some designers were creating, which makes it really hard to maintain the software. The people who maintain our foundational blocks are typically seasoned FreeSewing contributors, which is a good thing as every change to these blocks has ripple effect that impact many other designs.

By perhaps somewhat overeagerly re-using parts from various designs that were never intended for that, other designs (and designers) are now also faced with the delicate balance of maintaining not merely a design, but rather a library that is used by other designs.

So, we figured we would instead formalize this and create a proper library. The message we want to send to designers is:

• Inherit from our blocks, it’s what they are there for
• Reuse what’s in our library as much as you want
• Reach out to us before reusing parts from other designs

What’s in the library

We wanted to take this one step at a time. So for now, the library holds:

• A rectangle part. This is what we initially used to test-drive our solution.
• A sleeve part. This is the sleeve that was originally in the Brian block.
• A two-part-sleeve part. This is a combo of the two-part sleeve that was originally in the Bent block.
• A topsleeve part. This is the top part of the two-part sleeve.
• A undersleeve part. This is the under part of the two-part sleeve.

This is a modest start, as there’s obviously plenty of other things that would make a lot of sense in the library, such as collars, or cuffs, pockets, waistbands, and so on.

However, we wanted to start small and iron out any kinks before further extending the use of the library. You’ll also notice that merely by moving the various sleeves to the library, we already had to overhaul two foundational blocks, so it’s not like this was a small change.

Going forward, we will be looking to move more common parts into the library, with the ultimate goal that nobody should need to reinvent the wheel.