[Ifeffit] Larch 0.9.55

[Matt Newville]

Hi Folks,

Larch 0.9.55 is now available for download.  This comes only two weeks
after the announcement for 0.9.53, but there have been several important
improvements especially for Windows users outside of the US, and based on
bugs found or features requested during the Larch for XAFS Analysis
Workshop at the Virtual XAFS 2021 conference (there was a 0.9.54, but a few
things were fixed since then too!).  If you have installed a recent version
of Larch and are on a machine connected to the internet, you should see a
notice that version 0.9.55 is available, and can use that notice to
automatically install the update.  That will be much faster than installing
from the full installer.

A series of instructional videos made for this workshop on using Larch's
XAS Viewer application for various aspects of XANES and EXAFS analysis are
now publicly available at
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgNIl_xwV_vK4V6CmrsEsahNCAsjt8_Be.
Comments, questions, suggestions on these are most welcome, either on
youtube or here.  For folks without access to youtube.com, these videos are
also at  https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/videos/XrayLarch/

The changes here are relatively minor compared to the changes made in
0.9.53 (see
https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/pipermail/ifeffit/2021-July/010251.html).
The most important changes and fixes since 0.9.53 are:

  - Larch's GUI applications should again work without problems on non-US
Windows 10 machines.  There was a serious bug (possibly since Larch 0.9.52)
for using wxPython applications with Python>=3.8 and wxPython>=4.1.0.  I
believe we have a workaround, at least for now.

 - Fixes for turning CIF structures into Feff inputs and running Feff:
    -- more external CIF files from Crystallography Open Database and
Materials Project can be converted to Feff.inp.
    -- external Feff.inp files can be loaded and run.
    -- the name of the folder created for any Feff calculation can be
renamed before running Feff.

 - the plot selection choice in the XAS normalization panel for "one group"
and "selected groups" are no longer reset each time a data set is selected.

 - A reference spectrum can now be set for any XAFS spectrum.  When
aligning or energy-shifting XAFS data, you can now easily select all of the
spectra that share a reference and apply the same energy shift to those
spectra.  You can also easily select a reference group for one XAS spectrum
and copy that to a set of other "selected spectra".   There is not (yet?) a
way to select a reference channel from a file when importing data, so these
must be read separately and assigned.

 - a bug was fixed on the EXAFS / background subtraction panel on "copied
groups" to ensure that processing parameters (kweight, rbkg, etc) are kept
separate.

 - For linear combination fitting, a single energy shift can be varied
during the fit, shifting the unknown data to match the combination of a
(presumably aligned) set of standards.

 - For pre-edge peak fitting and Feff Path fitting, entries in the "fit
history" can have user-specified labels which can be more meaningful than
the default "Fit #1", "Fit #2", etc.

 - testing is now done only with Github Actions, not with the appveyor
service.

I want to thank all the people who took part in the workshop and gave
feedback -- XAS Viewer is a lot better than it was a week ago.  Thanks
to  Monica
Bairagi and Nengchuan Tian for help, and special thanks to Klemen Bucar for
helping track down and solving the Locale issue and working on the testing
tools.  And also thanks to Mauro Rovezzi for continued suggestions and
fixes.

If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please let me know.

--Matt
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