Hi folks, As some of you may know, I have been planning for a while to fork Artemis into two branches -- stable and development. It's going to work something like this: * The current version (0.7.008) will be the stable version. (Yes, I am fully aware of the irony of calling any version of Artemis "stable". ;-) For the next couple of months the feature set of stable Artemis will not change. I will only be fixing bugs as they become known. This will be the version recommended for most users. * The current version will be the base of the development version. I will add new features to this branch. Hopefully there will be enough users of the development branch that these new features will be sufficiently exercised as I get them written. * At some point I will decide to freeze the development branch and shift it down to the stable branch. That way, new features will eventually become available to the users of the stable branch, but only after they have been tested for a while. Hopefully, that will avoid some of the troubles we have had since version 0.7.000. * I will promise to make windows executables for every release of the stable branch. I won't promise to do so for every release of the development branch. * I haven't quite decided how to deal with numbering, but the stable branch will continue incrementing the minor number. The development branch will either start at 0.8.000 or at 0.7.500. In either case, the horae_update script will be modified to update either branch. * Windows users who would like to be involved with the development branch should consider installing ActiveState's perl distribution on their computers as that would allow you to test the source code as it becomes available. If anyone is interested in this, I can help get you started. But I would encourage only the enthusiastic to consider this. Most users will prefer to use the executables that I will build for the stable version. * I am not planning to fork any of my other programs. Specifically, I do not see a benefit to forking Athena. Finally, here is a partial list of features that are on the drawing board for the development branch: 1. Update the atoms page to use an interface modeled on the new GDS page. 2. Enhanced functionality of the feff interpretation page 3. Keep a history of all fits run. This will allow such things as over-plotting of different fits with the data, comparison of the log files from different fits, and so on. 4. Generation of math expressions for delta_R based on the crystal parameters used in atoms. 5. Import of CIF files. 6. Import of PDB files and conversion to feff.inp format. 7. A bunch of internal modifications that will not be user visible but will support some of the changes above and will need extensive testing. OK, that's all the news that's fit to print. I hope that people are downloading and trying out the new release. B -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- ravel@phys.washington.edu Code 6134, Building 3, Room 405 Naval Research Laboratory phone: (1) 202 767 2268 Washington DC 20375, USA fax: (1) 202 767 4642 NRL Synchrotron Radiation Consortium (NRL-SRC) Beamlines X11a, X11b, X23b National Synchrotron Light Source Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 My homepage: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/