[ghemical-devel] OpenBabel-1.100.2 Release Candidate 2, testers wanted

[Michael Banck]

[sorry if some people get this mail multiple times]

Hello everybody,

This is about the imminent OpenBabel-1.100.2 release. Geoff and I plan
to release on Thursday, February 19th, so any further contributions or
show-stopping bug report should be submitted until Wednesday, February
19th.

In the last two days, I managed to successfully build xdrawchem,
gchempaint and ghemical against 1.100.2 with dynamic linking and the
HAVE_CONFIG_H patch reversed. Thus, I have reversed the patch in CVS for
now.

Still, I'd be glad if more people could test 1.100.2, especially the
maintainers of 3rd party software building on openbabel, as you are a
lot more aware of the possible problems regarding your projects. I've
released a second release candidate, based on current CVS, at

http://www.stud.chemie.tu-muenchen.de/~banck/openbabel-1.100.2rc2.tar.gz

Please report your experiences to
openbabel-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.

One organizational issue are pre-compiled binaries. We really should put
them up at sourceforge.net and the website. I will do Debian packages as usual, but we
need people for

- RPMs (or contributed .spec files)
- Fink OS X packages
- Windows executables
- GUI frontends

Whoever does the binaries should not be worried about having to do
end-user support, I think we should announce that we only support the
source distribution, everything else is either community-driven (i.e.
volunteer-based) or the responsibility of the 3rd party distributor
(Debian, Fink, Fedora, etc.).


The code should be frozen now, the last outstanding issue (to my
knowledge) is the placement and organization of the Windows build-files.
Geoff and I agree that they should be in a top-level windows/-directory,
accompained by an INSTALL.Windows document in the top-level source
directory (i.e.  openbabel/windows and openbabel/INSTALL.Windows, not
openbabel/src/INSTALL.Windows).

Probably the easiest way for users to build openbabel on Windows would
be a batch-file in windows/, which copies an appropriate openbabel.h
from windows/openbabel.h.$NAME to src/, as well as the Makefiles. If
anybody could contribute this for his compiler, we would be grateful.

Also, having a list of supported comilers/build environments would be
nice to have in the README and/or in INSTALL.Windows (and on the
website).

So far I guess we have:

gcc/Linux (confirmed, Michael Banck)
gcc/Mac Os X (confirmed, Geoff Hutchison)
icc/Linux (confirmed, Michael Banck)
icc/windows (not confirmend, David Mathog?)
borland/windows (not confirmed, Vincent Favre-Nicolin?)
ms.visual.studio/windows (not confirmed, Chris Morley?)

Additions, corrections, and, most importantly, confirmations welcome.

Please, everybody mentioned, could you try to build the release
candidate and, if necessary, update the build files?

I propose the following naming scheme:

INSTALL.Windows
windows/babelconfig.h.$NAME
windows/Makefile.$NAME
windows/$NAME.bat

If you need more than one Makefile (e.g. one in $(top_srcdir), and on in
$(top_srcdir)/src), I propose to place the latter in
windows/src/Makefile.$NAME

If you need more than just simple Makefiles (or no Makefiles at all),
put them into windows/, too, (perhaps in the same namespace, like
openbabel.dsp.$NAME) and let $NAME.bat copy them into the right place
along with the Makefiles and babelconfig.h.

$NAME should be short, but self-explaining, e.g. "borland" or "icc", but
that is of course up to the person contributing.

I don't think it is crucial to have every platform ready for 1.100.2, as
we can release 1.100.3 at any time, having a openbabel-1-100-x branch
now, which enables us to do further development for 2.0 seperately (like
included David's fileformat framework). But having one Windows compiler
ready should be a requirement for the release, IMHO. So I urge you to
try out the release candidate as soon as possible and report back until
Wednesday.

Any comments welcome.


Michael

-- 
http://openbabel.sf.net