PixInsight Forum (historical)
PixInsight => Announcements => Topic started by: Juan Conejero on 2013 July 17 12:30:59
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Hi all,
Today we have removed all PixInsight 1.7.x installation files from our file servers. We have also disabled all updates for the 1.7 series.
Since the current version 1.8.0 RC7 of PixInsight has proven more stable, faster and more efficient than previous versions, let's move on.
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i hope you are right, i still get the occasional "hard crash" out of 1.8RC7 with no backtrace or anything (osx 10.8.4) :o hard to debug that.
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It is nice to move on, and I agree than 1.8RC7 is very stable.
However from a customer point of view, I would prefer to see an announce like: 'as 1.8RC7 is very stable, we will make it our main release and retire the version 1.7 in 2 weeks'. Or maybe even better: 1.8RC7 is now available as 1.8.0, but is identical as 1.8RC7 (so that new people do not have to wonder why there are only RC of PI - after all 'RC' is suppoed to have a meaning).
It would not change anything materially, I would just feel more comfortable.
This being said, I recognize that there are other reasons why you may have to act so quickly, like license broken or anything you may not want to discuss publicly.
--bitli
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I agree that it is odd to only have a "candidate" offering or equivalently to discontinue supporting the only actual "release" available.
In some sense it is more honest than what other software companies have been known to do: providing no support for existing software products or releasing as products versions that aren't really ready (very unstable).
If things ARE in limbo... I guess it's better to know than to be mislead. Still seems odd.
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There are going to be a few modifications to the current release, before it is launched as the official (final) 1.8 version. Most of them are going to be behind curtains, and some bugfixes, but we are also integrating new processing tools (modules). So, we ask for a little patience. Our development right now if built over 1.8RC7, and the 1.8.x cicle has officially begun with Juan's announcement.
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IMO sounds like what you will release next will effectively be 1.8RC8.
Mike
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Since I am being questioned... I have discontinued version 1.7 just because I have very good reasons to do so. I prefer to not comment more about it; surely everybody can figure out.
However from a customer point of view, I would prefer to see an announce like: 'as 1.8RC7 is very stable, we will make it our main release and retire the version 1.7 in 2 weeks'.
I prefer to tell the truth. The truth is that we have a production-stable release candidate version. It is not the final 1.8.0 version mainly because it still lacks some new and improved tools, some GUI improvements and a lot of PJSR functionality that I want to have included in 1.8.0. Hopefully it will be ready in September. If this is causing a climate of distrust then I am sorry, but that's all I can offer for now.
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Juan there is absolutely no reason to apologise, it is obvious that you wish to take all PixInsight users to the highest level and I am in total awe as to what you and the other guys give us. I am sure I am speaking for most if not all users to say a BIG thank you for this superb program. Let it continue forever
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A agree with you Juan. 100%
As 1.8 is now VERY stable (and it is really !!!) with new speed improvement, it is time to put 1.7 in the past.
When you changed from 1.6 to 1.7, there was no discussion. 1.7 has replaced the 1.6, that's all.
I don't understand why some users don't want to switch to 1.8 when you see ALL the newest features it has.
On the next PI training we will do at AIP in 2014, we will not support 1.7 nor 32 bits versions.
All trainers should have 1.8 64bits (Win, OSX, Linux) with latest release at the date of the training course.
Last year, we spent many time with guys who had 32bits version or 1.7 where they cannot access to the newest scripts ot functions or they got memory full when they integrate 10images because their computer is corrupted.... blablabla.
Next discussion will be to discontinue 32bits >:D >:D >:D >:D
Juan, many thanks for the newest functions of this week (intergration, starAlignment...) very nice improvement ! Speed, accuracy.
We have to talk about TGVdenoise. I'm not 100% happy (only 99% ;) ). There should be some improvement to do there, I think.
Philippe
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Philippe, I would appreciate if you send those commenta to me. I'm writing the next update of tgvdenoise, so I could use your inputs. :)
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Juan there is absolutely no reason to apologise, it is obvious that you wish to take all PixInsight users to the highest level and I am in total awe as to what you and the other guys give us. I am sure I am speaking for most if not all users to say a BIG thank you for this superb program. Let it continue forever
Amen
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I don't understand why some users don't want to switch to 1.8 when you see ALL the newest features it has.
Philippe
because it still crashes for me, hard, with no backtrace, that's why.
my machine is extremely stable and will run memtest for 48+ hours with no errors. also 1.7 does not suffer this behavior.
when i use 1.8RC7 i am compulsively saving the project, like every 10 minutes. twice i have lost everything i was working on. i can't let that happen to me again.
maybe it is an OSX thing and it's my fault for using OSX. i don't know.
sorry to spoil the lovefest but i also prefer the truth.
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Pfile,
I'm running Ripley RC7 on OSX 10.8.4 and have seen no problems at all - it's very stable. I have a number of large PI projects with lots of open images and multiple processes, and my system has with lots of other programs running at the same time.
I'm using a mid-2011 iMac with 12GB RAM, Intel Core i7, Radeon Graphics, dual monitors.
If I can help you to determine the source of your problems, please let me know. I'd be glad to help.
Sean
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sean, just wait, it will hit you.
in my latest project PI did not want to save the project when i was done, since one or more views was locked. as an aside, when this happens, the dialog is singularly unhelpful. so, it's dangerous to save the project when a view is locked? okay, what am i supposed to do? undoubtedly a view was locked because some process left it locked, not due to anything i had done. maybe the dialog could describe some steps to determine which view is locked and how to possibly unlock it.
while working on that same project, i got a segmentation fault on some process. i was lucky to be able to save the project and quit PI in that state. while it was in that state, something was very wrong with the real-time preview - it was taking a minute or two to display anything.
as i said, the machine is totally stable. no other programs die on me. my machine uptime is regularly measured in months. as i said the machine passed burn-in running memtest86 on all 32GB of ram. while i would agree that it's insane to run that much ram without ECC protection, i can't really do anything about intel's choices. all i know is that if i had problems with bitflips, other programs would crash on me or the kernel itself would eventually crash, but this never happens.
remember when i reported to juan that OSX was cleaning up in /tmp after the swap files' atimes exceeded some scripted limit in the OS? that limit is like 3 days by default. i'd regularly have 1.7 running far, far past that horizon. with 1.8RC7, i've never had it run that long. same hardware. same OS. different version of PI.
so i'm not sure what you can do to help me debug it. i never run PI 1.8RC7 unless it's attached to a debugger, and that has saved my bacon several times. sometimes i can pop the call stack and resume execution and then immediately save the project.
let me also just point out that what we are on is called RC7 and there were some very serious, deep, and difficult-to-solve bugs in all prior RCs, especially RC6. i have no doubt that there are still some bad bugs lurking around. in all fairness some of them may have come from 1.7 and are still around, but overall 1.7 was much more stable than 1.8RC7 for me.
rob
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A colleague from our observatory is currently testing the trial. He still hast a 32 bit OS and is not so familiar with operating systems and so on. He tries to run the stacking script, but it fails saying
"At address 5A17ED1B with exception code C0000005 :
Access violation: invalid memory read operation at address 00000000"
So my idea was switching back to 1.7 for the testing, but this is not possible any more (I used it in the past and it was fine working for me). Support for the 32 bit release is also not available. From the customer point of view, the best solution would be to keep the old stable 1.7 32 bit release available, so everybody can use PI in there current environment. Of course it makes totally sense to use 64 bit, since we can use more RAM and so on.
I am currently not sure, if it is the best way to quit 1.7 when the development of 1.8 is still running. In the end 1.8 is still a RC and it should be the decision of the user to use a RC or not (I also work in the software development business, it is not so easy to find the best solution for everybody).
Thanks,
Tobias
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Juan,
I too agree with your methology of product development and progression. Pixinsight is an awesome program. This is probably the best value in image processing. A very professional application. Thanks for all the work you guys put into Pixinsight. I have processed many great astro images using Pixinsight.
Keep up the great work
Gerry ;D
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Being very new to Pixinsight (Still in trial period although I have definitely made my decision to purchase the commercial license) I don't really have a lot of experience to base any critique upon the question of whter or not 1.7 should or shouldn't be discontinued. But I will say that I find 1.8.RC7 to indeed be very stable and also both a lot faster and resource efficient than I was led to believe by others describing thier experiences using older versions. Not really knowing the meaning of "RC" (I now understand it more as "Beta") I didn't think anything about it being "not ready for prime time". My limited experince felt like it was indeed fully released. And a fine application it is, too. In fact, PI has impressed me so much that I may be delgating my copy of Photoshop CS6 to working on family vacation photos instead of astrophotography from now on.
But I noticed in another post to this thread above that the 1.8.0 full release was originally scheduled for September 2013. Since this is now November 2013 I was wondering if we are getting close. Just curious, mind you. The schedule won't have any affect on my decision to purchase.
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Yes, the release date is a bit delayed, but is very close. There have being a lot of changes between RC7 and the final release, most behind the curtains, but also a few surprises. ;)
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Surprises!?! Sounds like fun... ;D
Like I said above, it didn't make any difference to my decision to purchase. I bought my new commercial license last night! 8)
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As Carlos told you, we're very close to the release date. In fact, I showed the 1.8 final release at the Munich workshop. Now there are some additional features... All working fine in my laptop. :)
Best regards,
Vicent.
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As a side question: is Juan all right? I've not heard from him on this forum since a while now...
Maybe working full throttle on 1.8 release?
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Yes.
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Still alive :-P Just overwhelmed with work on the upcoming version of PixInsight.
Thank you so much for your support, and sorry for being unresponsive lately.
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Don't worry, I was just genuinely worried!
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Got to say, while I am not suffering the types of problems PFile reported, I will be glad to see the release of 1.8.0 because there are some stability problems with the current release, as much as I love it. Its mostly little annoying stuff that a reboot fixes (merely shutting down and restarting PI is usually not enough) but they are there nonetheless: tools that stop responding, buttons that no longer work (most common is the triangle "apply to image" button on the bottom left stops functioning so you can't drag a tool process to the workspace or apply the tool by dragging the triangle onto an image), images that aren't recognized after loading, etc., etc.
The one big bust I run into and have reported on several times is a bug somewhere in PI's interface with images acquired using MaximDL. For me, having raw lights and flats show up out of range is more common than I care for and each time it crops up it takes a different work around in PI before I can get my images in range, which is a shame because MAximDL is to image acquisition what PI is to image processing, IMHO. And given that this only happens on one out of every 3 or 4 times I image tells me something funky is going on behind the scenes. If anybody cares, I am running PI under Windows 8.1 on a Samsung Laptop with 8GB of Ram and an i7 core (for anyone who remembers my prior posts about trying a swtich to Linux, well, lets just say that didn't go particularly well :-[ so I went back with my tail between my legs to mother Microsoft, *sigh*)
Again, nothing I can't work around, but if we are honest, there are stability issues with 1.8 RC7. As such, while I have not used it myself, I do have some sympathy for those asking for continued support for 1.7 until we see how 1.8.0 holds up under live conditions.
That said, there is nothing that even comes close to PI so I would put up with a whole lot worse.
Just saying,
Jim
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Hi Jim
Not sure why you are having problems with Maxim. Doesn't happen for me. Have you checked your Maxim settings? There are several format options for acquisition available in Maxim.
Geoff
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Jim,
what format have you set in MaximDL? If you save your raw images in 16bit integer, you shouldn't have any problems at all...
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Geoff and Papaf,
I have checked and rechecked and yet have constant problems with out of range raw images and it takes a whole lot of tweaking settings to get anything that works. Latest was a batch of Ha images of M74 to bring out the Ha regions in the arms. Exact same set up as my RGBs (in fact taken in the same sequence, but while the RGBs loaded fine, I had problems with all the Ha images and the problems were not consistent so I had to tweak each image individually and even then ended up with a poor quality stack. And I am not the only person who has suffered this problem as has been reported in other forum threads that I have commented on. See, for example:
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6061.msg41712#msg41712
Somewhere, at least for me, MaximDL and PI do not play nice together.
Sigh,
Jim
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something must be jacked up in maximDL because i16 is as close to a universal format as one can get.
you might be having problems with bias pedestal levels if your calibrated frames are coming out black or grey, but this only happens to me if i try to use a master created in maximDL.
rob
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Any word on the full release of 1.8?
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It is close... in Juan's relativistic time ;)