RE: Release candidate for Qhull 2012.1

[Robinson, Melvin D]

________________________________________
From: address@hidden address@hidden on behalf of Brad Barber address@hidden
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 11:54 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Release candidate for Qhull 2012.1

Hi all,

See below for the Qhull 2012.1 release candidate.  It is not deployed to 
qhull.org, because I need feedback on the changes.   The goal of this release 
is to clean up the builds and make them suitable to Octave, R, and other users.

If something is broken for you in Qhull 2012.1, please let me know.

Qhull 2012.1 adds libqhull.so for Octave and other users.  This shared library 
uses a static global data structure .   It is the same as the debian build, 
Qhull 2009.1.  To help avoid confusion, libqhull6_p.so is the new name for 
qhull with a dynamic global data structure (-Dqh_QHpointer).

Qhull 2012.1 fixes strict aliasing in qset.c and adds a qset test program.

Qhull 2012.1 includes a draft debian build in the 'config/' directory.  Someone 
will need to verify that it works.   As before, it produces libqhull.so and the 
qhull executables.  It could be updated to match the other builds.

A later version of Qhull may include a third interface to get rid of global 
variables.  It would pass qh_qhT as a parameter to each function call.  There 
would be a single source tree using a macro to enable the extra parameter.  
There would be a third shared library, tentatively named libqhull7_t.so for 
"threading".   If so, the C++ interface will probably switch to this library.

   http://gitorious.org/qhull/
   http://gitorious.org/qhull/qhull/blobs/master/src/Changes.txt
   http://www.qhull.org/download/qhull-2012.1-src-tgz.md5sum
   http://www.qhull.org/download/qhull-2012.1-src.tgz
   http://www.qhull.org/download/qhull-2012.1-zip.md5sum
   http://www.qhull.org/download/qhull-2012.1.md5sum
   http://www.qhull.org/download/qhull-2012.1.zip

Many thanks for helping with qhull.

                                        --Brad



I built Octave on Lion with this version of Qhull and this went OK.  It did 
fail one of the make check tests on convhulln:
octave:1> test convhulln
  ***** testif HAVE_QHULL
 cube = [0 0 0;1 0 0;1 1 0;0 1 0;0 0 1;1 0 1;1 1 1;0 1 1];
 [h, v] = convhulln (cube);
 assert (size (h), [6 4]);
 h = sortrows (sort (h, 2), [1:4]);
 assert (h, [1 2 3 4; 1 2 5 6; 1 4 5 8; 2 3 6 7; 3 4 7 8; 5 6 7 8]);
 assert (v, 1, 10*eps);
!!!!! test failed
assert (size (h),[6, 4]) expected
   6   4
but got
   12    3
values do not match

The same error also occured with the Qhull package from MacPorts (2011.2).  The 
difference was that I did not have to apply Ben's patch using when building 
against this version.  Not applying Ben's patch to 2011.2 resulted in many more 
make check failures.  

Any idea what could be happening to cause this to fail on Lion, but pass on 
Fedora?