[Radiance-general] Radiance "Official" Release

[Guglielmetti, Robert]

Hi Andrei,

My $0.02, as an outsider:

The NREL GitHub site is simply a place where we (NREL) post our installers. Perhaps unfortunately, GitHub expects the "official" and "pre-release" tags on all the releases hosted there. I follow the convention laid out by Greg Ward as far as what is the official release and what is pre-release code, and we name our installers based on this convention (where ".a" is alpha code, ".b" is beta, and the absence of a letter denotes "official" releases. To be clear, the NREL Radiance GitHub site is simply a mirror of the main Radiance code repository which is managed with CVS, is hosted by LBNL, and this is the official release page:

http://www.radiance-online.org/download-install/installation-information

As far as testing, there is no standard test protocol for builds or releases. I started some tests that can be run in the CMake framework, here:

https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/tree/combined/cmake_tests

A (long) while ago, (I believe it was) Georg Mischler (who) started an Scons-based test framework, that got about as far as mine did:

https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/tree/combined/test

My tests are stupid and fallible. Georg's tests are very old and test a lot of seldom-used stuff (and none of the new stuff like rcontrib or photon map). They are both in the source for what they're worth; people could build on either of these.  I believe CMake's test framework (CTest) is awesome and could be used to build a very robust set of tests, and we would love to add these to the Radiance source and incorporate them into a dashboard, but this is unfortunately way down there, on a long TODO list.

- Rob

On 7/7/15, 2:34 PM, "Kolomenski, Andrei (JSC-SF311)[WYLE INTEG. SCI. & ENG.]" <andrei.kolomenski at nasa.gov<mailto:andrei.kolomenski at nasa.gov>> wrote:

Dear Radiance Community,

What makes a Radiance release "official"?

Looking at the Radiance Github site (https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/releases), I see that version 4.2.2 is the latest "official" release, whereas 5.0.a.1, 5.0.a.2 and 5.0.a.3 are pre-release versions.

What makes a Radiance release "official"? Is there a validation procedure carried out? If so, who is in charge of this and what are some of the test cases used for validation?

Thank you in advance,
Andrei Kolomenski