[ITK] [ANNOUNCE] ITK 4.8.0 Release Candidate 3 is ready for testing!

[Matt McCormick]

On behalf of the Insight Toolkit community, we are proud to announce
that ITK 4.8.0 release candidate 3 has been tagged and is available
for testing! Please take this opportunity to test the new features in
the release candidate.


To obtain the source code,


  git clone http://itk.org/ITK.git
  cd ITK
  git checkout -q --detach v4.8rc03


For more details, please see the Git documentation [1].


A few selected highlights for this release:

- New remote modules: BridgeNumPy, LabelErodeDilate,
ParabolicMorphology, MinimalPathExtraction
- itk::FFTPadImageFilter to automatically pad images for the FFT
implementation’s supported greatest prime factor
- Additional point set registration capabilities.
- More modules can be built as shared libraries.
- GDCM, MetaIO, KWSys, MINC have been updated to their latest upstream versions.
Python wrapping is in excellent shape and works with the latest GCC,
Clang, and MSVC.
- Experimental cross-compilation support for Windows (MinGW-w64),
ARMv6 (Raspberry Pi), ARMv7 (Android), ppc64le (POWER8), and
JavaScript (Emscripten).

A more complete, detailed set of release notes will follow in
subsequent release candidates.


Please test the release candidate and share your experiences on the
mailing list, issue tracker, and Gerrit Code Review. Since GDCM has
seen a major upgrade to the latest version, please exercise DICOM IO,
and be on the lookout for regressions.

An Experimental build, which demonstrates how the test suite performs
on your local build system, can be submitted to the dashboard [2]
with:


  mkdir ../ITK-build
  cd ../ITK-build
  cmake ../ITK
  ctest -j 4 -M Experimental  -T Configure -T Build -T Test -T Submit


Visual Studio builds must also add “-C Release” to the ctest command.

Notify the mailing list if there are any unexpected failures.  Testing
your own applications against the RC is also appreciated.


Congratulations and well done to the 31 contributors to this release.
We would especially like to recognize the new contributors, David
Froger, Cyril Mory, Dzenan Zukic, Ivan Setiawan, Jan Bergmeier, Rolf
Eike Beer, Davis Vigneault, Gary JIA, and Alexander Hewer.



The final release will be approximately one week from now.




[1] http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK/Git

[2] http://open.cdash.org/index.php?project=Insight


New Features
---------------------

* Wrapping improvements

- Wrapping now uses CastXML instead of GCCXML
- The latest GCC, Clang, and MSVC are fully supported
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/888
- Cross-compilation and packaging support
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/904
- ITK_WRAP_VECTOR_COMPONENTS option to specify number of wrapped
vector components
- More classes wrapped


* Compiler Support

- GCC 5.1
- Clang 3.6.0
- Better cross-compilation support (requires CMake 3.3)
- Experimental support for Emscripten (JavaScript)
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/912
- Experimental support for the Raspberry Pi
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/887
- Experimental support for Android
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/893
- Experimental support for MXE/MinGW-w64
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/883
- Experimental support for the POWER8
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/891


* New Remote Modules

- MinimalPathExtraction
  - Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/1926/1332
- BridgeNumPy
  - Convert itk.Image to NumPy array’s and back
- LabelErodeDilate
  - Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/10380/3399
- ParabolicMorphology
  - Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/1926/1370


* Infrastructure Improvements

- An UpdateThirdPartyFromUpstream.sh script for 3rd party updates with
Git subtree
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/899
- Minimum required CMake version is now 2.8.9
- Many more modules can be built as shared libraries
- ITK_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES variable during initial configuration to
turn on use of common system third party libraries by default
- Release testing data tarball split from source tarball
- Gold linker used by default on Linux


* Filtering Improvements

- itk::FFTPadImageFilter to automatically pad images for the FFT
implementation’s supported greatest prime factor
- itk::AtomicInt class for parallel computation
- Various performance enhancements


* Registration Improvements

- Point set SyN registration
- Point set BSpline SyN registration


* Documentation Improvements

- The ITK Software Guide is now available in HTML
  - Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/890


* Third Party Library Updates

- GDCM updated to latest upstream
- KWSys updated to the latest upstream
- MetaIO updated to the latest upstream
- MINC update to lastest upstream

* Style improvements -- ITK gets more stylish with every release!

* Improved code coverage -- we are at 85.4%!

* *Lots* of important bug fixes

* And much more! See details in the log below.

Changes from v4.8rc02..v4.8rc03
------------------------------------------------

Bradley Lowekamp (3):
      BUG: Remove reliance on exceptions in StringTools::ToData methods
      BUG: Fix WriteCellsAsBinary and valgrind defects
      COMP: Explicitly export SingleValuedNonLinearVnlOptimizerv4

Matthew McCormick (4):
      COMP: Address may be used uninitialized in IdentityTransformTest.
      COMP: Address array subscript above bounds in VTKPolyDataReader.
      COMP: Work around GDCM test segfault with Clang 3.5+.
      BUG: Do not use pthreads with Emscripten.

Michka Popoff (1):
      ENH: Update PyInit for Python 3


-----------------------------------------------------

Errors or omissions? Please fix them here:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AQolOw7Hpn7SCRg0LjH53nxdWJe2gJTR0ngOyg3PWxI/edit?usp=sharing