CGAL-4.8 announcement

Maintenance/public_release/announcement/mailing-beta.eml

@@ -10,8 +10,8 @@ a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before the
 release of the final version of CGAL 4.8 later in March.
 
 That is the second "beta" release for CGAL-4.8. The reason is that there
-was important bugs in our CMake scripts for some use cases. See the details
+were important bugs in our CMake scripts for some use cases. See the
-on GitHub:
+details on GitHub:
 
   https://github.com/CGAL/cgal/issues?q=milestone%3A4.8-beta2+label%3A%22CMake+scripts%22
 

Maintenance/public_release/announcement/mailing.eml

@@ -1,92 +1,48 @@
-Subject: CGAL 4.7 Released, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
+Subject: CGAL 4.8 Released, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
 Body: 
 
-The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.7
+The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.8
 of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.
 
 Besides fixes to existing packages, the following has changed since
-CGAL 4.6:
+CGAL 4.7:
+
+  o General
+
+    - The support for Qt3 is dropped and all demos using it got removed.
+
 
   o Installation
 
-    - The minimum required version of CMake is now 2.8.11. CMake versions
+    - Starting with Visual C++ 2015 we no longer require Boost.Thread as we
-      3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 are supported.
+      use the C++11 keyword thread_local and the C+11 class std::mutex.
 
-    - All Qt4 demos have been updated and now require Qt5 to be
+    - The same holds for g++ 4.8 or later when the C++11 standard is used.
-      compiled. Qt5 version 5.3 or higher is required. The support for Qt4
-      is dropped. The code of the 3D demos now use modern OpenGL, with
-      shaders, instead of the fixed pipeline API of OpenGL-1.
-
-    - The Microsoft Windows Visual C++ compiler 2015 (VC14) is now
-      supported.  However, since this compiler is not officially supported
-      by Intel TBB 4.4 and Qt 5.5 (the latest versions available at the
-      time of this release), the parallelism features of CGAL and Qt5 demos
-      will not work.
-
-  o Advancing Front Surface Reconstruction (new package)
-
-    This package provides a greedy algorithm for surface reconstruction
-    from an unorganized point set. Starting from a seed facet, a piecewise
-    linear surface is grown by adding Delaunay triangles one by one. The
-    most plausible triangles are added first, in a way that avoids the
-    appearance of topological singularities.
 
 
-  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Shortest Paths (new package)
+  o Optimal Transportation Curve Reconstruction (new package)
 
-    The package provides methods for computing shortest path on
+    - This package implements a method to reconstruct and simplify 2D point
-    triangulated surface meshes. Given a set of source points on the
+      sets.  The input is a set of 2D points with mass attributes, possibly
-    surface, this package provides a data structure that can efficiently
+      hampered by noise and outliers. The output is a set of line segments
-    provides the shortest path from any point on the surface to the sources
+      and isolated points which approximate the input points.
-    points. There is no restriction on the genus or the number of
-    connnected components of the mesh.
 
+  o 3D Mesh Generation
   
-  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Skeletonization (new package)
+    - Add support of 3D gray level images as input for the tetrahedral mesh
+      generation.
 
-    This package provides a (1D) curve skeleton extraction algorithm for a
+  o Polygon Mesh Processing
-    triangulated polygonal mesh without borders based on the mean curvature
-    flow. The particularity of this skeleton is that it captures the
-    topology of the input. For each skeleton vertex one can obtain its
-    location and its corresponding vertices from the input mesh. The code
-    is generic and works with any model of the `FaceListGraph` concept.
 
+    - Add a new triangle-based isotropic remeshing algorithm for
+      triangulated surface meshes.
 
-  o Polygon Mesh Processing (new package)
+  o Point Set Processing
   
-    This package implements a collection of methods and classes for polygon
+    - Add Concurrency_tag to the functions compute_average_spacing(),
-    mesh processing, ranging from basic operations on simplices, to complex
+      edge_aware_upsample_point_set(), jet_estimate_normals(),
-    geometry processing algorithms. The implementation of this package
+      jet_smooth_point_set(), and pca_estimate_normals().
-    mainly follows algorithms and references given in Botsch et al.'s book
-    on polygon mesh processing.
-
-
-  o 3D Point-Set Shape Detection (new package)
-
-    This package implements the efficient RANSAC method for shape
-    detection, contributed by Schnabel et al. From an unstructured point
-    set with unoriented normals, the algorithm detects a set of
-    shapes. Five types of primitive shapes are provided by this package:
-    plane, sphere, cylinder, cone and torus. Detecting other types of
-    shapes is possible by implementing a class derived from a base shape.
-
-
-  o L Infinity Segment Delaunay Graphs (new package)
-
-    The package provides the geometric traits for constructing the segment
-    Delaunay graph in the max-norm (L Infinity). The traits also contain
-    methods to draw the edges of the dual of the segment Delaunay graph in
-    the max-norm i.e., the segment Voronoi diagram in the max-norm. The
-    algorithm and traits rely on the segment Delaunay graph algorithm and
-    traits under the Euclidean distance. The segment Voronoi diagram in the
-    max-norm has applications in VLSI CAD.
-
-
-  o 2D Visibility (new package)
-
-    This package provides several variants to compute the visibility area
-    of a point within polygonal regions in two dimensions.
 
 
 See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.