[ff3d-announce] version 1.0pre8 released

[Stephane Del Pino]

Dear ff3d users.

It has been a long time since previous release: one year!

In my opinion, a few objectives are still to be completed before releasing 1.0
*) finish documentation: it has been improved in this release thanks to the 
efforts of Olivier Pironneau, it requires more examples and some 
functionalities are still undocumented, especially for the standard finite 
element approach using unstructured imported meshes.
*) finish the non-regression testsuite and test the code again (some part 
especially use of unstructured meshes have not been tested enough).

Then, depending on the time I can work on ff3d, I would like to achieve two 
more objectives:
*) coupling of different finite elements: second order P2 and Q2 finite 
elements have been introduced in this release (implementation is not 
finished: periodic boundary conditions ) but it is still not possible to 
couple different finite elements (eg: as in P2-P1).
*) provide a simple GUI: an experimental GUI in Qt4/Vtk5 is already working. I 
think that a tool like ff3d needs simple way visualise results: in 3D, it is 
a complex task, with fictitious domains, it is worst...

Feed-back is really appreciated !

Change summary
==============
Here comes a summary of what changed in 1.0pre8. To get more information check 
ChangeLog file.

Bugs fixed in 1.0pre8:
* Fixed natural boundary conditions for P1 (unstructured meshes)
  thanks to the report of Pierre Michaud.
* Replaced the 'opendx' keyword by 'raw': 'opendx' keyword was confusing
  since it is not available yet.
* Fixed #14841: "normal vector of surfaces"
* Fixed unknown number in language for vectorial boundary variational
  formulae
* Important bug fixed: non-symetric systems defined using variational
  formula were not correctly discetized (coeffcients were not stored
  correctly in the matrix)

New in 1.0pre8:
* Added P2 and Q2 finite elements [this is still under development]
* Added "normal" component functions: nx,ny and nz.
* Began non-regression testsuite using autotest
* For clarity, changed syntax for integrals:
        "int(set)(f)" to "int[set](f)"
  this also applies for boundary terms in variational formulae
* Cleaned-up output
* Improved exception handling
* Faces and edges list are built on-demand, this should lower memory
  use.
* Matrix-free computations should now give the same result as
  assembled-matrices computations up to the machine precision.
* Improved GUI and ported it to Qt4 and Vtk5 [this code is still
  experimental]

Getting it
==========
To get the sources proceed as follow:
- cvs users:
  Getting 1.0pre7 release:
    cvs update -r v1-0pre7
  To keep in touch with the cvs tree use more likely
    cvs update -A
- getting tarballs, check the following url:
  http://www.freefem.org/ff3d/sources/
- windows binaries are available at
  http://www.freefem.org/ff3d/binaries.html

Best regards,
Stephane.