[Quantlib-dev] Project news

[Luigi B. <lui...@gm...>]

Hi all,
    a couple of project news.  The first is that a 1.3 release is long
overdue.  Well, that's not news at all, of course; the news is that I
want to get it out some time this month.  It's going to include quite
a few contributions, but not all we have received.  The blame is
squarely on me for not finding enough time to merge all of them;
however, I'd rather release what is there now, rather than waiting to
include more (and probably leaving out more contributions that would
come in the meantime).  If you sent a patch and don't see it in this
release, apologies; they'll be in the next (I'll try to shorten the
release cycle).
In particular, there's a couple of contributions from Mortoray and
Riccardo Ghetta that I've left out in the rain. They're two different
ways to make it easier to work around the singletons such as Settings.
 They're both valid, and I'm not quite sure what to do, so I'll try
and make them both available for review after the release---which
brings me to the second piece of news.

In the past few months, I've maintained a mirror of the QuantLib
repository on github, and a few people used it to contribute. Overall,
I've been quite happy of the experience as it made a lot easier to
share patches, review and apply them. I've brought it up with Nando
and Eric (the idea had been floating around for a while) and we agreed
to move the code there. The migration can be done in just a day or two
(in fact, I've tried the conversion once already and it went
smoothly).  It will open a series of possibilities; for instance, when
someone clones the repository and adds a patch, not only I'll be able
to merge it more easily into the "official" repository, but anybody
needing the patch will also be able to check out the modified version
from the clone without having to wait for me to get my acts together.
Another possibility will be to push modified versions of the code on
github in alternate branches, so that it's easier to review and
comment them (for instance, this is what I would do with Mortoray's
and Riccardo's patches).  And of course, it will make it much easier
for anybody to maintain a set of proprietary modifications while at
the same time keeping track of changes in the official library.
Anyway: I'll give you all a shout a few days before the migration. I'd
like to do it shortly, before creating the 1.3 release branch.

There would be more to discuss (whether we should start thinking of a
2.0, for instance, and how to change it in order to make it possible
to use it for parallel calculations; or when to start allowing C++11
features; or whether we really need both the quantlib-users and
quantlib-dev mailing lists) but it can wait for future posts. For now,
that's enough blabbering from me. As usual, I'm here for any feedback.

Later,
    Luigi