[ANNOUNCE] RTT and OCL v1.6.0 Released

I can't believe we've let it slip for this long, but finally this release 
arrived. Being planned for release somewhere 'the end of April', this hardly 
can be called 'agile development'. I previously thought a good time for 
release is when the code didn't change for about a month, and although we had 
such moments, that was only because I lacked the time for processing the 
ever-flowing in-pipe of bug reports and proposed fixes. It seems I'll have to 
find another measure to get us back in the fast-track...  The series of 
changes is long and it hasn't always been easy to maintain backwards 
compatibility. See below for a link to the possible issues you may encounter. 

Nevertheless, we've made a huge leap on overall usability, robustness and 
portability. This couldn't have been done without the countless testing, user 
suggestions and patches, which made the job of 'release manager' look quite 
modest in comparison.

The source (pronounce: sauce) hasn't had the time to cool down or new 
challenges are waiting for an answer: How can we UML-ify the state machines ?
What's the right pat(c)h for event-based data flow ? Can't we hide how (not) 
using threads affects a component's implementation ? And will we manage with 
no delays ? You're invited to find it out with us on the Orocos-dev 
mailinglist or skim through the web-forum's pages. Even more than ever, this 
just looks like the beginning...

Official release notes below.

Peter on behalf of the Orocos team.

***
***
           The Orocos Real-Time Toolkit v1.6.0.

  The Orocos development team is pleased to announce the next major
feature release of the Real-Time Toolkit, a C++ toolkit for building component 
based, real-time robotics and machine control applications.

You can download this release from
  <http://www.orocos.org/stable/rtt/v1.6.0/orocos-rtt-1.6.0-src.tar.bz2>
and read the installation instructions on
  
<http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v1.6.x/doc-xml/orocos-installation.html>

The Real-Time Toolkit (RTT) library allows application designers to
build highly configurable and interactive component-based real-time
control applications. This release's major feature highlights are:

 * Support for Mac OSX
 * Much improved error reporting and usability in various places
 * Improved the scripting language and state machine definitions
 * More transparent network communication
 * Many small improvements suggested by the user community.

If you'd like a high level overview of the Orocos libraries, visit
  
<http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v1.6.x/doc-xml/orocos-overview.html>
If you'd like to get started building your own components, visit
  
<http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v1.6.x/doc-xml/orocos-components-manual.html>

This release is backwards compatible with the 1.2.x and 1.4.x releases, 
although some functionality has been deprecated or alternative usage patterns
are preferred. These and other changes and improvements can be found
in the Orocos RTT Changes document on
  
<http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v1.6.x/doc-xml/orocos-rtt-changes.html>

***
***

         Orocos Components Library (OCL) v1.6.0

This release of the Orocos Components Library is aimed at the
Real-Time Toolkit v1.6.0. and offers improved functionality for
distributed applications, motion interpolation and kinematics.  Some
components of the OCL library are also available as Debian 4.0
'Etch' packages from
 deb http://svn.fmtc.be/debian etch main

Major improvements are:
 * Upgraded to the recent comedilib 0.8.1 release
 * Improved error reporting of automatic component deployment
 * Improved setting up distributed applications from XML files.
 * Most components are dynamically loadable
 * Support for logging to the NetCDF file format

A new stand-alone application has been added as well:

deployer-corba:
 A task-browser application which can connect local components to
 remote components by looking up the name, IOR file or plain IOR. It
 is a CORBA server itself as well.

An overview of the documented components is available here:
  
<http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/ocl/v1.6.x/doc-xml/ocl-overview.html>

This release can be downloaded here:
  <http://www.orocos.org/stable/ocl/v1.6.0/orocos-ocl-1.6.0-src.tar.bz2>

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