[SasView Users] SasView News and a New Release (5.0.6)

Fri Jun 30 05:45:14 EDT 2023

Dear Members of the SasView User List,

We hope this email finds you safe and well.

GENERAL NEWS
It is just over a year since our last release of SasView but in that time the Core Developer Team has been quite active. So much so, that when we came to consider a new release we thought long and hard about the best approach: whether to include the proverbial 'kitchen sink' and hope for the best, or to be a little more targeted. In the end we decided to go with the latter and so the new release, SasView 5.0.6, is only a bug fix release. But as you will see below, some of the bugs that have been addressed are ones that had been causing a number of your difficulties.

SasView 5.0.6 is still just short of achieving feature-parity with SasView 4.x, but we hope this will happen with the next release. So we would once again like to take the opportunity to encourage and remind any of you still using SasView 4.x to start actively making the transition to SasView 5.x. There is no active development of SasView 4.x, there has not been any for several years, and nor do we now envisage any in the future. In addition, SasView 5.x provides functionality that 4.x does not have.

Please note that at the time of writing we are unable to offer a conda package for SasView 5.0.6 due to issues beyond our control, but we are working towards one.

In other news:

*               A very successful Workshop on Magnetic SANS Data Analysis & Software Prospects - obviously with a focus on SasView - was held in Lund in June 2022 (with thanks to Annika Stellhorn for organizing it) which generated a number of excellent suggestions for enhancements to SasView to support this community. Indeed, it led to a follow-up Workshop in April this year. A report on the first Workshop appeared in Neutron News (https://doi.org/10.1080/10448632.2022.2126691).

*               In October 2022, several of the Core Developer Team attended the first in-person Code Camp held since the Covid-19 pandemic.

*               And in January 2023 the Core Developer Team was delighted to hear that Paul Butler (NIST NCNR), the driving force behind SasView since its inception, had been awarded a 2022 Silver Medal by the US Department of Commerce for "his global leadership in developing the world's leading software for analyzing small-angle-scattering data" leading to "the first sustainable, community-based scientific software for these techniques". Whilst a significant honour for Paul, this award is also great recognition for the SasView collaboration.

NEW RELEASE
The Development Team is pleased to announce the release of SasView 5.0.6, available for download as usual through the website at www.sasview.org<http://www.sasview.org>.

This release is a bug fix release only but does fix several issues that many Users had found problematic:

*               The failure of the program to start when installing on a new system due to issues finding the custom_config.py file has been fixed.

*               The speed with which the program starts up has also been improved.

*               The bcc_paracrystal and fcc_paracrystal models, which have been labelled as "under review" since 2018, have been checked and corrected and the documentation for all the paracrystal models has been completely reworked. And in this endeavor the SasView Development Team would very much like to express their sincere gratitude to those members of the community that assisted with this task.

*               Plots now properly support custom data names in the legend.

*               A problem with the intermittent blanking of plots has also been fixed.

*               The issue with the LM optimizer failing to run on GPUs or when the starting value of a parameter was outside the min/max range has been fixed.

*               A number of fitting parameter defaults have been changed to be more realistic.

*               A number of other issues in the documentation have been corrected and/or updated.

NEW MODELS
The following models have been added to the Model Marketplace since v5.0.5 was released:

*               Octahedron_truncated_txtytz

*               Octahedron_truncated

*               Rating Curve

*               Pringle-Schmidt Helices (a revision & documentation update of the existing model)

*               Lamellar Slab Partition Constant

KNOWN ISSUES
The rpa (Random Phase Approximation, for polymer scattering) model remains temporarily withdrawn.

Of course, as always, there remain many things that could be added, improved or, sadly, that need fixing. So please continue to provide feedback, bug reports (issues), and, when possible, fixes, either to the code or the documentation or tutorials, as GitHub pull requests, for those who can, or by simply emailing help at sasview.org<mailto:help at sasview.org>.

FUTURE PLANS
Another Core Developer Code Camp is being held in September this year, hosted by ISIS/Diamond. And several members of the Core Developer Team will be attending the 25th Anniversary CanSAS Workshop at the ILL/ESRF in October.
Meanwhile, plans are currently being developed for a larger Contributor Code Camp (what we are terming Code Camp 'plus') to be held in the US in January 2024. The idea behind this is to facilitate an expansion of the SasView contributor base by providing knowledge and guidance for those who want to be able to help develop the application. The itinerary is still being worked on, but we currently envisage a 7 day workshop that will blend the traditional, task focused development activity of our Core Developer Code Camps with codebase orientations, tutorials, and support activities for new contributors using a hands-on approach. Development activities include tutorial development, documentation development, video development, coding development, website management, and validation and testing activities, as well as many discussions about priorities and future directions for SasView. More information will be posted to this SasView Users list in due course.

Thank you for your continued support! And, as ever, if you would like to get involved, please see https://www.sasview.org/contribute/ for further information.

The SasView Development Team
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