Release of Alembic 1.0 Release Candidate 1

[Erik.Strauss]

2011-06-29: Alembic 1.0, release candidate 1

Hello Alembic users! Welcome to the latest beta version of Alembic.
As we close in on a 1.0
release, we hope the API and file format are now stable and fully
forwards-compatible. We consider these to be at a first "Release
Candidate" stage. (note that this doesn't yet apply to the
application-
specific reference implementations). As with all pre-release software,
we can't guarantee that changes won’t occur between now and a full 1.0
release.

The main Mercurial repository has been updated (http://code.google.com/
p/alembic/source/list), and a new tarball has been uploaded (http://
code.google.com/p/alembic/downloads/list).

This release is mostly a bugfix and cleanup release. We've improved
the build support for Windows and OS X, as well as conformed the
definitions of the Curves and NuPatch types more closely to the RI
spec. Those changes, though, do mean that Curves and NuPatch geometry
written out with previous releases will not be recognized with this
release.

The complete code changes for this release can be examined here:

http://codereview.appspot.com/4662068

Some highlights:

- The flags and arguments for the AbcExport Maya plugin have been
updated based on feedback from the community, and to be more Maya-
idiomatic. You can see all the arguments supported by entering
"AbcExport -h" in the script editor.

- The Makefile setup for the AlembicIn Houdini SOP is greatly
simplified, though still not fully integrated with Alembic's CMake
setup.

- The PRMan procedural now supports the Points, NuPatch, Curves,
and FaceSet types from AbcGeom.

One other important thing to note: previous releases of Alembic did
not require any of the compiled Boost libraries, but going forward,
Alembic requires libboost_thread.

Although this is our initial 1.0 release candidate, it should still be
considered pre-release software, and should not be used for critical,
deadline- driven production work.

If you have any questions about this release, please feel free to ask
them
on the alembic-discuss group:

http://groups.google.com/group/alembic-discussion

-The Alembic Team