[Debichem-devel] Fwd: Roll out of a newer upstream release (1.2.0) for Avogadro ?

[Michael Banck]

Hi Mark,

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 11:24:12PM +0300, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:
> ----- Forwarded message from Mark Williamson <mw529 at cam.ac.uk> -----
> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:13:55 +0100
> From: Mark Williamson <mw529 at cam.ac.uk>
> To: mitya57 at ubuntu.com
> Subject: Roll out of a newer upstream release (1.2.0) for Avogadro ?
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.8.0
> 
> We make quite a bit of use of avogadro in our research here at Cambridge, but,
> it does have a habit of crashing... quite a bit. 

That's great, and yeah, I am aware it is crashing a lot :-/

> Whilst Marcus Hanwell is focusing on the v2.x branch at the moment, it
> would appear that there has been some maintenance on the 1.x branch
> recently and there is a newer upstream release for Avogadro (1.2.0)
> that purports to fix "countless bugs":
> 
>  https://sourceforge.net/projects/avogadro/files/avogadro/1.2.0/
> 
> It seems that this was released last year:
> https://twitter.com/AvogadroChem

Not sure how you got that impression from the tweets? At least
https://twitter.com/AvogadroChem/status/743207546136203265 is from this
month.  There has been a 1.1.0 beta version (which I think is in Ubuntu)
for a while, but no final 1.2.0 release as far as I am aware of.
 
> However, it only just has been uploaded to sourceforge.

I made quite a bit of push getting 1.2.0 relesae and naging Geoff and
Marcus anually about it.  I packaged the RC for testin and will upload
the 1.2.0 relesae in due short, thanks for the reminder.
 
> We make use of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in the Chemistry department here at Cambridge
> and I have managed to build a 1.2.0 .deb locally using the
> avogadro_1.1.1-0ubuntu2.debian.tar.gz framework, with only a minor refresh of
> the quilt patches. I am considering pushing this out locally at Cambridge to
> our local repositories in the department.

Was it more stable in your tests? I did ony very limited smoketests so
far which did not bring up major issues.
 
> We would really welcome this as an official Ubuntu update to the v1.x series,
> and, given that it has been quite easy to build an updated version here, I was
> wondering it this could be rolled for 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS?

I will talk to Graham Inggs about that who is at the same conference as
I am right now; I am not sure what the requirements for official Ubuntu
backports are.
 
> Increasing the stability of this tool would be a valuable aspect to our
> research.

Awesome!


Michael