Hi everyone, There is one feature of the new version of Athena that requires some explanation. I discovered a programming error in Athena that has existed for a long time and which made it difficult to add new features to Athena. In order to accommodate three features in this release (as well as future improvements), I had to make a change to the contents of the Athena project file and a corresponding change to how Athena reads them. The result of this is that a project file written by version 0.9.18 cannot be read by earlier versions of Athena. To manage a situation where you need to send a project file to someone who has not yet upgraded to 0.9.18, it is possible to explicitly ask Athena to write a project file that is backwards compatible. This is done by checking the "Backwards compatibility" check button in the File menu, as shown in the attached screenshot. Check that button, then re-save the project file. Athena project files exported this way will lose a small amount of information, but they will be imported without trouble by earlier versions of Athena. I apologize in advance for any confusion. I would not have made this decision were I not convinced that the new functionality was worth the potential confusion. Regards, B PS: For the technical-minded, I'll explain the situation in more detail. The change involves dropping the use of this Perl module: https://metacpan.org/module/MooseX::StrictConstructor I had been using that module to restrict the creation of new attributes for the objects that contain a data group. The effect of that module is to terminate the program when it encounters an unknown attribute. I don't quite recall why I decided that was the preferred behavior, but it has been in place since the early releases of Demeter. In 0.9.18 I needed to add three new attributes: an uncertainty in energy shift after aligning, a normalization parameter that is in Larch but not Ifeffit, and a flag related to processing dispersive XAS data. As I integrate Larch into Demeter, there will be more new Data attributes. Having made this change for this release, I do not anticipate a similar problem in the future. So, I had to bite the bullet and make this change that affects backwards compatibility. The check button for backwards compatible project files simply filters out the three new attributes before writing the project file, hence the small amount of information loss. -- Bruce Ravel ------------------------------------ bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Science Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2 Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 Homepage: http://xafs.org/BruceRavel Software: https://github.com/bruceravel
