Gnuastro 0.7 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce the seventh release of GNU Astronomy Utilities
(Gnuastro 0.7).

Gnuastro is an official GNU package consisting of various command-line
programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of
(astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic
command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full
list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general
tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the
links below respectively:

  https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html


https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html


https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html

For a full list of what is new in this release compared to the
previous official release, please see the NEWS file below [1]. To
uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2] and to check the validity of the
tarballs using the GPG detached signature see [3].

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.tar.gz   (4.9MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.tar.lz   (3.2MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.tar.gz.sig (833B)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.tar.lz.sig (833B)

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed):
198a3986c1647263e3df18e4a5dfbcf5  gnuastro-0.7.tar.gz
f0c852755e3ca6a3ade66d5b6fa580c8  gnuastro-0.7.tar.lz
2b5e79da1bfff476ec3b555caf4b1729b8713717  gnuastro-0.7.tar.gz
d2ff0b9ed185b4f185a5e069da89d477216456c5  gnuastro-0.7.tar.lz

This is the first bug-fix release, with more bugs fixed than major
features added! This may be a good sign that Gnuastro is starting to
stabilize and its tools are becoming more mature. But of course, we
still have a long way to go reach the 1.0 version (first link below),
and many tasks (second link below). So please join us if you are
interested.

https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/GNU-Astronomy-Utilities-1_002e0.html

http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?group=gnuastro

I am very grateful to (in alphabetical order): Valentina
Abril-melgarejo, Leindert Boogaard, Nushkia Chamba, Takashi Ichikawa,
Oryna Ivashtenko, Geoffry Krouchi, Alan Lefor, Juan Molina Tobar,
Dmitrii Oparin, Teymoor Saifollahi, Jenny Sorce and Aaron Watkins who
provided many great comments, suggestions and/or bug reports to this
release. I am also generally very grateful to the organizers and
attendees of the 4th Indo-French Astronomy School that was held here
in Lyon. It was a very productive week for Gnuastro (with great
suggestions along with many bugs that were found and fixed).

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can be
different for different programs) for guidelines on how to cite and
acknowledge them in your papers. 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.
  Texinfo 6.5
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15.1
  Help2man 1.47.6
  Gnulib v0.1-2032-g3bd9c3d70
  Autoconf archives v2018.03.13-87-g72e8def
For Gnuastro's build dependencies, please see:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad

--
Mohammad Akhlaghi
Postdoctoral research fellow,
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL),
Observatoire de Lyon. 9, Avenue Charles André,
Saint Genis Laval (69230), France.





[1] Noteworthy changes in release 0.7 (library 5.0.0) (2018-08-08) [stable]

** New features

  Installation:
    --enable-debug: debugging flags, no optimization, no shared libraries.
    --enable-check-with-valgrind: Run `make check' tests within Valgrind.

  Arithmetic:
    - `set-A': Set a name (`A' in this case) for the popped dataset. This
               allows only reading the dataset it into memory once and
               possibly using it many times.
    - `fill-holes': Flip background (0) pixels surrounded by foreground 
(1).
    - `collapse-sum': collapse/remove a dimension by summing over it.
    - `collapse-min': collapse/remove a dimension by using maximum value.
    - `collapse-max': collapse/remove a dimension by using minimum value.
    - `collapse-mean': collapse/remove a dimension by averaging over it.
    - `collapse-number': Number of elements included in the collapse.

  CosmicCalculator:
    - Default cosmology set to Plank 2018 results (Paper VI).

  MakeCatalog:
    --minx: minimum position along first FITS axis.
    --maxx: maximum position along first FITS axis.
    --miny: minimum position along second FITS axis.
    --maxy: maximum position along second FITS axis.

  Table:
    --colinfoinstdout: column information when writing to standard output.

  Library:
    - gal_array_name_recognized_multiext: If format contains multiple 
datasets.
    - gal_dimension_collapse_sum: collapse/remove a dimension by summing.
    - gal_dimension_collapse_mean: collapse/remove a dimension by 
averaging.
    - gal_dimension_collapse_number: collapse/remove a dimension by number.
    - gal_dimension_collapse_minmax: collapse/remove a dimension by 
extremum.
    - gal_wcs_remove_dimension: Remove a dimension in the given WCS 
structure.

** Removed features

** Changed features

  Crop:
    --checkcenter: the units of value depend on mode (image or WCS).

  MakeCatalog:
    - `--checkuplim': new name for `--checkupperlimit'.
    - `--brightnessnoriver': new name for `--noriverbrightness'.

  Library:
    - gal_txt_write: new `colinfoinstdout' argument.
    - gal_table_write: new `colinfoinstdout' argument.

** Bugs fixed

  bug #54057: Building failure due to not finding gsl_interp_steffen.
  bug #54063: Match tests in make check fail randomly.
  bug #54186: MakeCatalog's --checkupperlimit not keeping output's name.
  bug #54188: MakeCatalog's Upperlimit not being sigma-clipped properly.
  bug #54284: Crop segfault when catalog contains no data.
  bug #54285: make check fails if g++ not present.
  bug #54286: BuildProgram's configuration file, not built by default.
  bug #54297: No Match output when --notmatched called and no match.
  bug #54298: Table not writing array when there are no rows.
  bug #54312: Crash when CFITSIO doesn't have fits_is_reentrant function.
  bug #54346: Non '-I' or non '-L' strings in CPPFLAGS or LDFLAGS cause 
crash.
  bug #54358: Arithmetic's where, not ignoring blank values in condition.
  bug #54406: Insufficient sanity checks in mode symmetricity calculation.
  bug #54430: BuildProgram fails with older Libtool versions on dash.





[2] Lzip has better compression ratio and archival features compared
to the common `.gz' or `.xz' formats. Therefore Gnuastro's stable
releases are made in `.lz' along with `.gz' for historical
reasons. The alpha/test releases are only in `.lz'. If you don't have
Lzip, can download and install it from its webpage:

  https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html

If you use GNU Tar, then the single command below should uncompress
and un-pack the tarball:

  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.7.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.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.7.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.tar.gz.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 1849814357EFB73A

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.