[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro 0.9.75 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

We are almost ready for the 10th release of Gnuastro (version 0.10)!
I am very happy that we have progressed so far, thank you very much
for all the support that has made this possible.

In preparation for this official release, I am happy to announce
version Gnuastro 0.9.75. It would be great if you could try building
and using this tarball until next week (when we'll make the official
release). If you see any warnings, errors, or unreasonable outputs
please let us know so it is corrected and the transition to Gnuastro
0.10 can be as smooth as possible for everyone.

For the full list of changes since the last alpha-release (0.9.55),
see [1] below (which is actually just portions of the NEWS file in the
tarball). The highlights are: several bugs have been fixed, Crop now
supports cropping 3D data cubes (with 3 positional values), a warning
is printed when memory-mapping, and the two long tutorials are broken
into subsections.

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-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz [3.3MB]
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz.sig [833B]

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed):
  145d94c29da02e7a0363eb7ee9655437  gnuastro-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz
  9ec44e03ce672c1ba01fde4fa81b712b86005f99  gnuastro-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz

For this release, I am very grateful (in alphabetical order) to Hamed
Altafi, Roberto Baena Gallé, Zahra Bagheri, Leindert Boogaard, Bruno
Haible, Raul Infante-Sainz, Lee Kelvin, Elham Saremi, Zahra Sharbaf,
David Valls-Gabaud and Michael Wilkinson for their very good
suggestions and 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 7.0.8-56
  Gnulib v0.1-2793-g9f00cc0d8
  Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-55-gc5711b3

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.





[1] Changes in Gnuastro 0.9.75 (since version 0.9.55):

  All programs:
   - When an array is memory-mapped to non-volatile space (like the
     HDD/SSD), a warning/message is printed that shows the file name and
     its size. Later, when its deleted, a warning/message is also printed,
     informing you that it has been deleted. These warnings can be very
     useful when you actually have enough RAM, but forget to increase the
     `--minmapsize' value (therefore significantly slowing down the
     program). When you don't have enough RAM, but don't want to be annoyed
     with the warnings, you can use the new `--quietmmap' option to disable
     them.

  Crop:
   - Can also crop 3D datasets (data cubes). A 3D crop has the same syntax
     as the old 2D mode, only when the dataset is 3D, three coordinates
     (values, ranges or catalog-columns) should be given to the relevant
     option. Just note that `--polygon' crops are still not supported in
     3D.

 ** Changed features

   Library:
   - New `quietmmap' argument added to the following functions (as the
     argument following `minmapsize'): `gal_array_read',
     `gal_array_read_to_type', `gal_array_read_one_ch',
     `gal_array_read_one_ch_to_type', `gal_data_alloc',
     `gal_data_initialize', `gal_fits_img_read',
     `gal_fits_img_read_to_type', `gal_fits_img_read_kernel',
     `gal_fits_tab_read' `gal_jpeg_read', `gal_label_indexs',
     `gal_list_data_add_alloc', `gal_match_coordinates',
     `gal_pointer_allocate_mmap', `gal_table_read', `gal_tiff_read'
     and `gal_txt_image_read'. For more, see the the documentation.

  Book:
   - The two larger tutorials ("General program usage tutorial", and
     "Detecting large extended targets") have been broken into subsections
     for easier readability.
   - The "Hubble visually checks and classifies his catalog" tutorial has
     been removed because it didn't come with a dataset, so it was hard for
     people to use. Also, all its operations were already present in the
     general tutorial.

 ** Bugs fixed
   bug #56480: Segfault in statistics library's histogram function.
   bug #56641: MakeProfile's center position changes based on precision.
   bug #56635: Update tutorial 3 with bug-fixed NoiseChisel.
   bug #56662: Converting -R to -Wl,-R causes a crash in configure on 
macOS.
   bug #56671: Bad sorting with asttable if nan is present.





[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-0.9.75-f8af.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-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz | tar -xf -'):

  $ lzip -d gnuastro-0.9.75-f8af.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.9.75-f8af.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-0.9.75-f8af.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.