[Bug-gnubg] Release 1.01.000 / MS Windows build available

[Michael Petch]

Howdy All,

Happy Canada Day and Happy Independence Day (this week) for those
countries that observe that holiday.

Until today I hadn't had the time to finish off the new MS Windows
installer, but I did manage to get that task done.

Download from:

http://www.gnubg.org/media/windows/gnubg-1_01_000-20130701-setup.exe

It is recommended (but not required) that you install into a new
directory or uninstall the older release.

The Installer changes:
- Installer will only install on Windows 2000 SP4 or higher
- Installer no longer needs to run as an elevated user privilege (Power
User or Admin). If running as a standard user it will install itself
into the application directory in the users home directory
- If you wish to install as Admin (On Vista or newer OSes), download the
setup and in MS Windows file explorer right mouse click on the setup and
use "Run as Administrator". You will need to do this if you wish to
install to \Program Files (x86).
- After accepting the license a new page has been added on systems where
your processor may support SIMD instructions (for improved performance).
If your using an antiquated processor with no SIMD support (SSE2 and
AVX) the option page will not be available and will default to the
universal i386 executables (no SIMD support).
- AVX support is listed as EXPERIMENTAL, and at present will not be the
default for systems with AVX CPU and OS Support.
- The supported SIMD instructions of your OS and CPU is displayed at the
bottom of this new options page.
- If you have an AVX processor you also need to be running MS Windows 7
SP1 or higher for this option to be available.
- If installing into a directory with an existing install, you are asked
if you wish to run the uninstaller (if present) in the installation
directory
- At the end of the installation process a command window will appear
while the Python modules are compiled. This is normal.
- If installing into a directory with an older installation without
doing a proper uninstall, the new installer will delete specific files
from older installations that may interfere with proper installation of
the new version.
- The Uninstall process has been fixed to properly search for the users
.gnubg preferences directory.


The ChangeLog is attached for the changes since the 1.00.000 release.
The primary changes from the user perspective are:

- For MS-Windows the minimum required OS is MS Windows 2000 SP4.
- Experimental AVX (SIMD instructions) for the neural net code has been
added by Philippe Michel, and I created the infrastructure to support it
for the build process.
- Python has been upgraded to 2.7.5.
- The Python environment is a complete set of libraries including TK.
- Support for Python IDLE (Python Integrated Development environment).
For those who wish to use this feature, load the GUI, turn on the
"command" panel (View/Panels>/Command). Enter a > (greater than sign)
and hit enter in the command box in the bottom right of the GNUBG main
window.
- Readline support (command completion, and history) is available for
those who install on MS Windows XP SP2 and above while running
gnubg-cli.exe (Command line interface) version.
- GNUBG Python scripts have been moved to the scripts/ sub-directory. If
you wish to change the command line interpreter or the GUI processing it
has been moved to functions in scripts/gnubg.py
- When GNUBG is loaded it will attempt to load (if it exists)
scripts/gnubg_user.py . You can place your own user defined functions
into that file to have them automatically loaded. This file won't be
deleted during an uninstall.
- MySQL support in MS Windows was fixed (had been broken for quite
sometime). Postgres support never worked on MS Windows so has been
removed for that platform.
- Database options allows hostname:portnumber to be specified for MySQL
(And Postgres on platforms where it is supported)
- The No SSE version of gnubg.exe and gnubg-cli.exe have a maximum
support for 4 threads to save on memory for older systems with limited
resources.
- New functionality to support a new GNUBG Python Module 'hint'
function. This produces hint information (limited to move hints, but not
cubes) and returns a hint dictionary.
- Board preferences are saved when clicking OK on the Board preferences
option screen.
- Alternate Language support was broken in 1.00.000, and has now been fixed.
- Other minor bug fixes reported by users and developers.

Other notes On *nix/BSD platforms:
- With IPython installed, IPython will be the default command line
interpreter.
- MySQL and Postgres player database support has been fixed.
- autoconf --enable-sse has been renamed --enable-simd . Also supports
type avx . SIMD support is on by default.
--enable-simd=TYPE/--disable-simd are used to override it.
- autoconf --enable-cputest has been cleaned up
- autoconf processing better detects the CPU SIMD capabilities of the
build environment.

If you encounter problems with the new installer please contact me. Many
issues were resolved with the help of various computers/OSes. Thanks for
the testing by Ian Shaw and Philippe Michel.

If things look okay I will use this release and installer for the
official 1.00 announcement on the GNUBG webpages.

Thanks
-- 
Michael Petch
GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304

ChangeLog-1_01_00.txt
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