New releases for Jul16 (Taurus 4.0.1 and Taurus 3.7.3)

[Carlos Pascual]

Hi all,

Today we are announcing two simultaneous releases of Taurus:

- Taurus 4.0.1: the first official release for the 4.x series
- Taurus 3.7.3: a support release for the (now legacy) 3.x series

The source files and windows installers can be downloaded from PyPI:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/taurus


The documentation for both releases is available at:

http://www.taurus-scada.org


Taurus 4.0.1 brings many changes. The most important are:

- Taurus core is now simpler and scheme-agnostic (tango is
now an optional dependency, and an scheme-agnostic API is available)
- Proper units support introduced (numerical attribute values are now
pint.Quantity objects)
- Model "fragments" support has been added
- The eval scheme is now much better (simpler and more powerful syntax)
- Epics scheme is now available
- taurus.qt now uses new-style PyQt signals (guiqwt3 is now supported)
- Icon resource files are no longer needed. Better Theme icon support
- Much larger and improved testsuite
- setuptools-based installer (pip now works without --egg)
- documentation has improved
- several old, deprecated and unused modules have been cleaned
- many more...

For a detailed list of changes, see the CHANGELOG:

http://sf.net/p/tauruslib/taurus.git/ci/4.0.1/tree/CHANGELOG.md

And the issue tracker:

http://sf.net/p/tauruslib/tickets/milestone/Jul16/

or, for a full log of commits, run (in your git repo):

git log 3.7.0..4.0.1


Regarding backwards compatibility: Taurus 4.0.1 provides a backwards
compatibility API to facilitate the transition for applications created
for taurus 3.x. Most applications should run with no or minor
modifications in Taurus 4 and deprecation messages will be logged to
help identifying the parts of the code that should be updated later on).
Only in very specific cases, where the compatibility cannot be handled
automatically, the application may need to be modified in order to run
on Taurus 4.

We encourage you to try your applications with this new release as soon
as possible, and to report any issues found so that we can avoid a long
transition time from 3.x to 4.x.
Please note that new features are likely to be implemented on the 4.x
series only, and the 3.x support may be discontinued soon.


Regarding the 3.7.3 release, it is just a bugfix update with respect
to the 3.7.0 released last January. It fixes bugs #260, #261, #269,
#277 and #300 as well as few other issues for the 3.x series.


If you encounter problems with any of these releases, please
report them back to the taurus mailing list:

taurusl...@lists.sourceforge.net

or put a ticket in the taurus project:

http://sourceforge.net/p/tauruslib/tickets/


Cheers!

Carlos, (on behalf of the taurus developers)

--
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Carlos Pascual Izarra
Scientific Software Coordinator
Computing Division
ALBA Synchrotron [http://www.albasynchrotron.es]
Carrer de la Llum 2-26
E-08290 Cerdanyola del Valles (Barcelona), Spain
E-mail: cpas...@cells.es
Phone: +34 93 592 4428
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