[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro 0.9.55

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

Almost two months have passed since Gnuastro 0.9 and already many new
features have been added and several bugs have been fixed. As a
mid-term trial, I am happy to announce the availability of version
0.9.55 (55 Git commits after version 0.9). Please try building and
using this version and if there are any warnings or problems, send it
to `address@hidden' so we can be sure it is fixed before the
next stable release.

Gnuastro is moving ahead on its path for higher-level operations. For
example you can now do arithmetic operations, or WCS conversions, on
table columns (FITS tables or plain text), with the Table program
(directly on the command-line). Or, if you know the observed
wavelength of an emission line, you can get the emitter's redshift
with CosmicCalculator. The installation now also does more thorough
checks on the necessary libraries and fixes many problems some of you
had when multiple/conflicting versions of a library were present on
your system. The full list of additions/changes in this release is
available below in [1] (excerpt of the `NEWS' file).

Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this
release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity
of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature see [3]:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz 
[3.3Mb]
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz.sig [833b]

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed):
  01fad4cee9aaa21bcffc010afe553ff0  gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz
  ea30c6ad54a9f57ee20d6c4edca7dd096635032d  gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz

(In alphabetical order) Alexey Dokuchaev, Raul Infante-Sainz, Joseph
Putko directly contributed to the source of this release, and Hamed
Altafi, Zahra Bagheri, Leindert Boogaard, Bruno Haible, Lee Kelvin,
Elham Saremi and David Valls-Gabaud provided valuable feedback, ideas
or bug-reports.

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
be different for different programs). Citations _and_ acknowledgments
are vital for the continued work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget
to support us by doing so.

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.6
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.16.1
  Help2man 1.47.10
  ImageMagick 7.0.8-49
  Gnulib v0.1-2642-g5905d8ca9
  Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-48-ga4b55f8

The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball are described
here:
  https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad

--
Postdoctoral research fellow,
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC),
Calle Vía Láctea, s/n, E38205,
San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.





* Noteworthy changes since Gnuastro 0.9:

** New features

  Arithmetic:
   - `unique' operator removes all duplicate (and blank) elements from the
     dataset and returns a single-dimension output, containing only the
     unique values in the dataset.

  CosmicCalculator:
   --obsline: alternative way to set the used redshift. With this option
     instead of explicitly giving the redshift, you can give a rest-frame
     and observed wavelength and the redshift to use will be calculated
     internally. For many lines, it is possible to give the line name
     instead of its rest-frame wavelength. For example
     `--obsline=lyalpha,6000' will use the redshift where the Lyman-alpha
     line has been shifted to 6000 Angstroms.
   --usedredshift: Print the used redshift as a "Specific calculation" (in
     line with other single-valued calculations).

  Fits:
   --primaryimghdu: Copy/cut the given image HDU to the zero-th/first
     HDU of the output file that doesn't yet exist.

  Statistics:
   --sigclip-number, --sigclip-median, --sigclip-mean, --sigclip-std: Do
     sigma-clipping and only print the desired value as a single-value
     measurement. Until now sigma-clipping results included a lot of
     visually useful information, which also made automatic usage of
     results hard. These options fix this issue. Please see the example in
     the book under `--sigclip-median' for a nice use case.

  Table:
   - Column arithmetic. It is now possible to apply many operations on the
     input table columns before printing them in the output. Similar to
     Arithmetic, but on table columns. The operators and notation is just
     like the Arithmetic program. See the "Column Arithmetic" section of
     the book for a detailed discussion and several examples.
   - WCS to Image coordinate conversion with `wcstoimg' and `imgtowcs'. For
     example if the input catalog has at least an `ID' column and two `RA'
     and `DEC' columns, the set of options below will produce 5 columns
     where the last two columns are the image coordinates for each row
     based on the WCS in `a.fits':
           `-cID,RA,DEC -c"arith RA DEC wcstoimg" --wcsfile=a.fits'
   --head: Only output the given number of rows from the top of columns.
   --tail: Only output the given number of rows from the bottom of columns.

  Library:
   - New `speclines.h' library functions and macros related to spectral
     lines. It has many macros with line wavelengths, and several functions
     for using them in combination with their names.
   - list.h: Functions to return the last element in linked lists. For
     example `gal_list_sizet_last' or `gal_list_data_last'.
   - gal_arithmetic_operator_string: Return operator string from code.
   - gal_arithmetic_set_operator: Return operator code from string.
   - gal_blank_initialize_array: Initialize an array with blank values.
   - gal_dimension_remove_extra: Remove extra (length 1) dimensions.
   - gal_list_data_to_array_ptr: Make an array of pointers from the list.
   - gal_fits_img_info_dim: Only return the size information of a dataset.
   - GAL_BLANK_INT: Blank value for `int' (can be 16-bit or 32-bit).
   - GAL_BLANK_UINT: Blank value for unsigned `int' (can be 16-bit or 
32-bit).

** Changed features

  Installation:
   - Better `./configure' tests (using Gnulib's `AC_LIB_HAVE_LINKFLAGS') to
     avoid some crashes during `make' when the host had multiple
     conflicting versions of some dependencies (GSL in particular).

  Arithmetic:
   - The output of co-adding operators is no longer the same type as the
     input in general. The output of the `min' and `max' operators are
     still the same type as the input. However the `number' and
     `sigclip-number' operators will output an unsigned 32-bit integer type
     and the rest (`sum', `mean', `std', `median', `sigclip-median',
     `sigclip-mean' and `sigclip-std') return 32-bit floating point
     datasets

  MakeCatalog:
   - When a clumps catalog is requested, MakeCatalog will automatically
     deduce the total number of clumps (at a small cost in
     performance). Until now, it was mandatory for the clumps label dataset
     to contain the total number of clumps in the `NUMLABS' keyword.

  Library:
   - gal_statistics_outlier_flat_cfp: Improved implementation with new API.

** Bugs fixed
  bug #56195: astscript-sort-by-night crashing because of AWK.
  bug #56246: Single-valued measurement must abort with no value in 
Statistics.
  bug #56256: Segmentation fault when reading plain text array/image.
  bug #56257: ConvertType: Values not preserved when converting text to 
FITS.
  bug #56299: CosmicCalculator fails at z=0.
  bug #56324: Column metadata not usable when input is from pipe/stdin.
  bug #56424: Warp crashes with empty string given to options.





[2] Lzip has better compression ratio and archival features compared
to the common `.gz' or `.xz' formats. Therefore Gnuastro's alpha/test
releases are only in this format, but for historical reasons we also
include `.gz' tarballs in the official releases. If you don't have
Lzip (you can check with `lzip --version' command), download and
install it from its webpage:

  https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html

If Lzip is present and you use GNU Tar, then the single command below
should uncompress and un-pack the tarball:

  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz

If the command above doesn't work, you have to un-compress and un-pack
it with two separate commands (or use a pipe to feed the output of the
first into the second: `lzip -cd gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz | tar -xf -'):

  $ lzip -d gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar





[3] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify gnuastro-0.9.55-9d7d.tar.lz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 71E899012D174B66

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.