[Ifeffit] artemis development in the near future

[Bruce Ravel]

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 at 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/