Update Python stubs instructions

[greg19]

Currently the Python stubs page says that ostr00000/freecad-stubs should be used. These stubs has been scraped from the source code a while ago and are sometimes no longer accurate. Since FreeCAD >=1.1 started including stubs in the main repository, there should be instructions how to use them. Also, the owner of the PyPI package is planning to archive it: ostr00000/freecad-stubs#48 (comment).

[chennes]

Hey @mnesarco you want to add this to your to-do list? 😁

[mnesarco]

Since FreeCAD >=1.1 started including stubs in the main repository, there should be instructions how to use them.

Is this true?
There are pyi files in the main repo, but they are not used to generate stubs. Are there any official stubs in the main repo that I am not aware of?

[greg19]

Since FreeCAD >=1.1 started including stubs in the main repository, there should be instructions how to use them.

Is this true? There are pyi files in the main repo, but they are not used to generate stubs. Are there any official stubs in the main repo that I am not aware of?

@ostr00000 probably you are the most knowledgeable here

[ostr00000]

the most knowledgeable

It was a while since I used FreeCAD as python developer, so I may not be up-to-date. But I will try to find out the situation.

Basically, it is preferred to keep stub files in official repo, because it is synced with C++ code (as you know the stubs are not update regularly).

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I checked following releases:

• the official package for linux is AppImage, which I think is limited for developers, but I checked content of this file (FreeCAD_weekly-2026.02.11-Linux-x86_64-py311.appimage --appimage-extract) and there is no .pyi files at all.
• fedora build fails ❌ : https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/freecad/nightly/
• ubuntu PPA build is 0.21.2 (very old, 2 years ago) ⌛ : https://launchpad.net/~freecad-maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/freecad-stable
• ubuntu 25.10 has 1.0.0 ⌛(also too old for stub) https://packages.ubuntu.com/questing/freecad
• window portable version (.7z) - no .pyi files,

I suspect that when compiling FreeCAD, the stubs are not copied into build package at all. I believe this is an error, because the purpose of .pyi is to be released together with the code.
To fully verify this, FreeCAD should be compiled manually to see what really happens there, Unfortunately, I will be busy in the next week to check this.

If I remember correctly, it was @tritao who implemented the stubs in FreeCAD official repo. Can you @tritao give us more insight?
Maybe we should report an issue in official FreeCAD repo about missing .pyi in release packages? (or better create PR)
I am not sure, but maybe the .pyi files should just to be copied in CMakeList.txt? - then this should be very easy task.

[mnesarco]

pyi files in the FreeCAD source repo are NOT stubs, they are used to generate intermediate c++ code for bindings. That idea was implemented by @tritao to replace the original xml files used to generate bindings. The idea was to in some future, use that pyi files also to generate the stubs, but that is not a reality today.