[Gchempaint-main] GChemPaint-0.5.3 released

[Jean Bréfort]

Hi,

Some good news and also some bad news (perhaps not so bad).

First the good news:

The release of 0.5.3 today. New for this version are:

WARNING: This is a development version. It is unstable, may crash at any
moment and loose or alter your data.

The main changes are:
- Add initial support for stoechiometry coefficients in reactions.
- Add a group/align command in contextual menu.
- Allow full arrows heads for equilibrium arrows (bug #9537).
- Fixed bug #10654 (thanks to Christian Lohmaier).
- Fixed various other bugs.
- Updated translations: de, it.
- New templates (nucleic bases and nucleosides) thanks to Serge Moreau.

Most of the new features are implemented as entries in the contextual
menu. This is a choice I made but there is room for discussion about
what should be implemented as tools with a button in one of the
toolbars, what should go in contextual menu, and what should be in both.

Sources are available as usual at savannah:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/gchempaint/gchempaint-0.5.3.tar.bz2
http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/gchempaint/gchempaint-0.5.3.tar.gz

md5sums:
8f3940a782b3ed53a2ed35322f3c0055  gchempaint-0.5.3.tar.gz
b387dba0590cae4ba6dc0103d48bb2a2  gchempaint-0.5.3.tar.bz2

Then the other news:

This version needs gchemutils-0.3.2 which is not compatible with
previous versions.

Because there are only 24 hours a day, some tools I hoped to introduce
before 0.6.0 will not be ready if I want to release within one year from
now. Curved arrows will not be in 0.6.0 and probably delocalized bonds
will also be missing.
In 0.5.3 (as in 0.5.2) undo/redo is unreliable if a reaction or a group
has been created.
There are crashes for which I could not find the source. On my desktop
computer it crashed on start up during about two weeks recently and do
not have this behavior anymore. Very strange. If you have such a
problem, please file a bug report.

As a conclusion, what remains to be done before 0.6.0:
- stabilize undo/redo.
- make alignement persistent when an object is changed.
- probably replace the use of ps2eps by an internal routine and add epsi
export.

Later, plans are to replace gnome-canvas by a cairo based canvas. The
gnome canvas has many instabilities and is not maintained. This might be
the main goal for the 0.7-0.8 series. I also hope to have a shorter
development cycle, two years being much too long. I feel one year would
be better even if less new features can be introduced.

Best regards,

Jean