[vtkusers] announce: VTK 8.2.0.rc1 is ready to try

[David E DeMarle]

Hi folks,

VTK 8.2.0 release candidate 1 is out^1. Please give the release candidate a
try and report any problems that you find to us via the gitlab issue
tracker with an "8.2.0" milestone. Developers, use the milestone to let us
know of any fixes that you want integrated to the release branch in time
for 8.2.0 final in a few weeks time. Ideally your branches will start at or
above the 8.2.0 tag.

We are still gathering feedback from the 108 committers to make up the
official release notes but in the meantime here is my summary of some of
the bigger changes.

* Tcl, OpenGL"1" and Qt4 are no longer supported in this release.
* Visual Studio 2013 is deprecated as are the GeoVis modules.
* There is a new infrastructure for selection that supports boolean
combinations of difference selection types. The original selection
infrastructure has not yet been deprecated.
* There is a new reader foundation class that makes it more straightforward
to add new file formats.
* There is a brand new high performance algorithm for extracting
isosurfaces from unstructured grids which generally performs 15x faster
than its predecessor.
* The vtkMolecule classes gained distributed memory parallel features and
an ability to derive bonds from nuclei.
* Users can now customize volume rendering with their own shaders in the
same way that polydatamappers can be customized.
* Volume rendering now has a direct isosuface mode.
* A number of VTK-m's accelerated filters were exposed inside VTK filters.
* QVTKOpenGLWidget has been refactored and once again supports quad buffer
(active) stereo.

As usual the API difference report is on the wiki.
<https://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/API_Changes_8_1_1_to_8_2_0>

Thank you for all the great effort VTK community!

p.s. If you look carefully you may notice that there are actually two new
releases on the download page today. The 8.1.2 patch release is just a few
bug fix commits beyond the former 8.1.1. 8.1.2 should be a drop in
replacement for any codes out there that are using 8.1.1 and we recommend
it at least until 8.2.0 is finalized.

^1 Well nearly out, I haven't pushed the signed tag on commit 6aa7b028 yet,
nor have I published the data tarballs on the download page, but those will
be up shortly.

David E DeMarle
Kitware, Inc.
Principal Engineer
21 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065-8662
Phone: 518-881-4909
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