[Radiance-general] Radiance Versioning (WAS: Re: learnix installation)

[Guglielmetti, Robert]

Hi Chris, 

Version 4.2.2 is tagged as the "latest release" because it's the latest
*official* release. It's unfortunate wording, I suppose, but that's always
the way GitHub rolls. Indeed, there have been 144 commits as of this
writing since the official release:

https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/releases/tag/4.2.2


So, yeah, ya probably want something fresher. =/ The latest builds, from
any source, will generally be based on what is technically alpha code
(hence the current 5.0.a releases); the Radiance source tree is never
tagged as beta for more than a day or so, and again when it's at "official
release" status, then it's back to "alpha" status. At NREL we append a
number after the code status (e.g. 5.0.a.1) when we tag for our alpha/beta
release packages, just to keep everything straight.

Radiance was incremented to version 5.0 recently in light of some major
feature inclusions such as the photon map, but there was never an official
blessing, so the latest "official release" remains the patched 4.2.2. But
for sure, v5.0 has some nice features, and Windows support caught up to
them ‹ and 64-bit support was (finally) added ‹ in the last month or so.
NREL will be releasing another round of 5.0 packages soon in light of a
bug fix that was checked in the other day which may affect more than a
couple of users: 

https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/commit/aa4541445b3988563331067f6b6e643bd73
33466


As we do not have automated builds set up (yet), we try and just roll out
new packages as-needed. For now, the version most Radiance users will want
is 5.0.a.3:

https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/releases/tag/5.0.a.3


Š5.0.a.4 to follow RealSoonNow.

- Rob

On 6/17/15, 7:13 AM, "Christopher Rush" <Christopher.Rush at arup.com> wrote:
>
>Picking a more current version from the NREL github seems to be the most
>user-friendly method to get the current version (even then you'll have to
>decide if you stick to the "latest release" version 4.2.2 from 2014 or to
>get the most recent bug fixes that are in all the successive versions
>following that).