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

[Mark Williamson]

On 01/07/16 10:31, Michael Banck wrote:
> 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.
>

Dear Michael,

This was an error on my part; I misread the last tweet at 
https://twitter.com/AvogadroChem as "Jun 15" to mean June 2015, given 
the context of tweet just before (from last year) 2 Sep 2015 (the 
reordering of the date indices caught me out). Apologies for the 
confusion and thanks for pointing this out.

>> 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.

Thank you for your efforts here.

>
>> 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.

My testing has been quite limited and I do not currently have any 
metrics. I was considering a basic statistical metric whereby I examined 
the rate of apport invocations from avogadro crashes over a month with 
the new version and compare with the rate from the old version.

>
>> 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.

Once again, many thanks.
>
>> Increasing the stability of this tool would be a valuable aspect to our
>> research.
>
> Awesome!
>
>
> Michael
>

Mark