[Rivet] Rivet release: this week!?!

[Andy Buckley]

Hi everyone,

You may have noticed that we missed our informal "end of Jan / start of
Feb" Rivet/AGILe release deadline. While I don't like missing deadlines,
even flexible, self-imposed ones like this, we have found quite a few
bugs in the last couple of weeks and the release will be better for
being a little later.

However, I still think we should aim for a release this week: please let
me know if you think the bug that you're trying to squash is bigger than
that! As far as I know, the real blocker bugs at the moment are:

 * Class-slicing breaks projection polymorphism (say that fast 10
times!) Fix: projection member variables -> pointers. Status?
 * A couple of projection bugs: James just reported a problem with the
jets projection compare() method, and I've been seeing a similar (?)
problem with ChargedFinalState deleting itself early.
 * HepMC version on AFS blocks super-simple use at CERN/wherever AFS is
available (I've been updating the bootstrap script to use the LCG copies
if available).
 * Composite particle veto implementation?

I think all these should be fixable before the end of the week if we put
appropriate effort into fixing them: we should be working towards
getting this release out, rather than implementing new features or
analyses at the moment.

Additionally, the Genser libraries aren't ideal at the moment, which
means that the initial generator support will just be for Fortran Herwig
and Pythia (except for developers like Piergiulio). We'll get that
sorted "upstream": it's not a blocker for this release.

Cheers,
Andy