[Swarm-GIS] [Swarm Announce] Announcing the release of Swarm 2.2

[Steve Railsback]

***ANNOUNCING THE RELEASE OF SWARM VERSION 2.2***

Swarm Development Group announces the release of Swarm 2.2, our new 
stable version. See www.swarm.org for information; downloads are at the 
"stable release" page.

Swarm 2.2 is a wrap-up of the development snapshots that we have been 
encouraging people to use for the past several years. A single code set 
has been frozen and packaged for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and as source 
code for other platforms. The Swarm documentation set has also been 
updated. A big thanks to Marcus Daniels for preparing the release, which 
was funded by SDG membership fees.

Please note:

* Swarm 2.2 is essentially a maintenance release, containing a few new 
capabilities but fixing a number of bugs and incompatibilities. 
Improvements include better support for HDF5 and Lisp archiving of data, 
with support for serialization; data summary options added to EZGraph 
and Averager; and binomial and Poisson random number distributions. 
Several components have been optimized for efficiency, including the 
random number generators.

* The release includes a new way to install Swarm for Windows, along 
with the Cygwin software that Swarm runs in. Swarm has been included in 
a special version of the Cygwin setup program, so both can be installed 
from the internet in a single, simple setup process.

* Some parts of the release (e.g., Mac and Fedora binaries) are still 
being tested and moved to the Swarm ftp site. We will try to keep the 
Swarm wiki up to date as these changes are made.

* REMEMBER that Swarm is maintained ONLY via volunteer effort and SDG 
memberships. Big efforts like producing new releases---or any major 
future development of Swarm---require funding. If you use Swarm, please 
remember to pay for a membership and remember to include SDG memberships 
in your project budgets.

* Please report any problems to the Swarm support mail list, and 
contribute any solutions you find.

* Remember that the Swarm wiki (www.swarm.org) is an interactive, 
user-contributed site. Visit it, contribute information about your 
project, make improvements, etc.

* Swarm trivia: The first-ever post to this mail list announced the 
alpha release, in April, 1995. So Swarm 2.2 also marks the 10th 
anniversary of Swarm’s user community!


The Swarm Development Group board of directors

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