[Rivet] Rivet 1.5.0 released

[Andy Buckley]

Good evening everyone,

After another marathon of infrastructure improvements, new (LHC!)
analyses, and bug fixes, we are finally proud to release Rivet 1.5.0.

Neat features include:

 * A variety of complete LHC analyses, from all the LHC experiments.
More, please!
 * Improved beam compatibility checking: the analysis beam
specifications in the .info file are now used to determine whether
incoming events have compatible beam types, and the beam energies are
also checked.
 * Much improved path handling for analysis plugin library and metadata
file loading -- and user-callable functions in the C++ and Python APIs
so that external packages can also use the same file searching mechanism.
 * 2D histograms!
 * New style options on compare-histos, with options to e.g. easily make
histograms more suitably styled for inclusion in greyscale publications.
 * Improved analysis metadata / code unification and more manual content.
 * Formalised analysis categories, including new PRELIMINARY and
OBSOLETE categories
 * Run timeout options for use on troublesome batch farms.
 * Plus many usability/UI improvements, and bug fixes in the framework
and the standard analyses.

Source tarballs are available for download from the usual place, linked
from our website at
http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/
and the PDF manual on the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.0694) will be
updated shortly.

We'll now be branching the development for a while: the 1.5 series will
accumulate bug fixes and new analyses, while the framework development
re-engineers some of the internal memory handling and histogramming for
the legendary 2.0.0! Please keep supplying us with analyses and bug
reports, and we'll try to keep releases coming at acceptable intervals :)

Thanks in particular to the http://mcplots.cern.ch team for finding many
analysis bugs, and for using their nifty and Rivet-based system to
validate this release for us and to find a few last minute issues: we
hope you'll do it again!

Best wishes,
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.