[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro 0.7.71 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hi everyone,

We are almost ready for the 8th official release of Gnuastro. To
ensure that version 0.8 is as bug-free as possible for everyone's work
we are making this test release (0.7.71). Please try building and
using this test release and inform us if you confront any crashes or
unexpected behavior, or if you have any suggestions.

Since the last test release (0.7.42, in September), 29 commits have
been made that have added some new features, changed some library APIs
and fixed many bugs. You can see the full list of changes since
version 0.7.42 in [1] below.

The most significant/useful new feature is that standard input
(through a pipe for example) can now be used to pass a dataste into
some of the programs (those that accept plain text inputs). So for
example if you want to extract two columns from a (possibly large)
FITS table and store them in another FITS table you can use the
command below (the `-s' options ensures that the column meta-data is
also stored in the new FITS file)

  $ asttable -s catalog.fits.gz -cID,MAG_XXX | asttable -omagxxx.fits

Or if you want some basic statistics from only one column of a FITS
table, you can use:

  $ asttable catalog.fits.gz -cMAG_XXX | aststatistics

In the future we plan to add the ability to pass FITS files through
the shell's pipe also, thus more fully adopting the Unix philosophy.

Here are the compressed source and a GPG detached signature of this
alpha-release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2] below, and to
check the validity of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature
see [3] below.
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.tar.lz
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.tar.lz.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed):
907e96a2ca2aa19c94eef947289b666d  gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.tar.lz
3963859643cfa0f3ad7d2c228386d3b8818083ba  gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.tar.lz

For this release, I am very grateful to (in alphabetical order)
Fernando Buitrago, Raúl Infante Sainz and Johan Knapen for their great
suggestions and bug reports.

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge it. 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 made the tarball. They are only mentioned here to
be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.5
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.16.1
  Help2man 1.47.8
  ImageMagick 7.0.8-16
  Gnulib v0.1-2254-gb457ace1e
  Autoconf archives v2018.03.13-99-g76956d7
For Gnuastro's build dependencies, please see:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad

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





[1] NEWS since version 0.7.42-22d2. For the full set of changes since
version 0.7, please see the `NEWS' file in the tarball.

** New features
  All programs:
   - Standard input (for example from pipes) is now available to feed input
     to all programs that accept plain text input (ConvertType, Match,
     MakeProfiles, Statistics, Table).
   - Updated acknowledgement statement (output of `--cite' option).

  Fits:
    --numhdus: prints the number of HDUs in the given FITS file.

  Statistics:
    - If an input table has only one column, Statistics won't complain and
      abort when no `--column' (`-c') is given: there is only one column to
      use anyway, so it will be used. In the absence of which column to
      use, it will still complain and abort if the input has more than one
      column.
    - Input can be given using the standard input (for example a pipe).

  Library:
    - gal_txt_stdin_read: Read lines in standard input into a list of 
strings.

** Changed features:
  Library:
    - gal_data_copy_to_allocated: Also copies string metadata (e.g., name).
    - gal_array_read: list of strings (from standard input) acceptable.
    - gal_array_read_to_type: list of strings (from stin) acceptable.
    - gal_array_read_one_ch: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_array_read_one_ch_to_type: list of strings (from stdin) 
acceptable.
    - gal_table_info: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_table_read: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_txt_table_info: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_txt_image_info: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_txt_table_read: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.
    - gal_txt_image_read: list of strings (from stdin) acceptable.

** Bugs fixed:
    bug #54782: Segment's check image not removing sky clumps some tiles.
    bug #54810: Arithmetic crash when previously named operand renamed.
    bug #55025: MakeCatalog's `--prepforconv' option being ignored.
    bug #55079: Blank EPS or PDF page when width options not given.
    bug #55157: No sanity check on values given to Crop's --section.





[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. 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-0.7.71-efe6f.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 -d gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.7.71-efe6f.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-0.7.71-efe6f.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.