[Coin-announce] Version 1.00 of CBC - or when will I stop messing with the code

[John J Forrest]

I have decided that cbc is sufficiently robust that I should stop throwing 
in significant changes on a daily basis.  So I am declaring version 
1.00.00 of cbc.  The preferred stand alone executable can be obtained by 
"make solve" in Cbc directory.  This executable has much of the 
functionality of "clp" for LPs.  In a similar way as with clp you can get 
more information by ? or gomory? etc.  That aspect needs more work, but 
anyone can help by querying the short descriptions and expanding the long 
descriptions.  Of course if anyone wants to write a smooth interface, I 
would be delighted.  I would definitely recommend using "solve" to play 
around with various strategies before coding your own driver.

I expect 1.00.00 to be quickly followed by 1.00.01 as I fix some bugs but 
I am going to try and be more predictable in my changes.  Bugs will be 
fixed and the version number may change if the bug was significant.  If 
changes are made for tuning purposes this will be noted in the main 
program file COIN/Cbc/Test/CoinSolve.cpp and I will try and leave the old 
tuning as an option.  New instances of classes will be added freely as 
they will not impact code.  So, for example, I have been asked to 
implement n-way branching.  I should have done it earlier.  This will not 
affect people not using this.

CBC is complex in that it uses Cgl, Osi and Coin.  It also is closely 
linked to OsiClp and Clp and these links will increase for performance 
purposes.  This can make it difficult to maintain compatibility while 
developing new ideas.  So I will be using COIN_NEXT_VERSION in all code 
(especially Cbc, OsiClp and Clp) so that people will not be impacted by 
changes (unless they are bold) until I declare the next version - which 
should be 1.01.00.

As always comments and suggestions are welcome.

John Forrest
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.coin-or.org/pipermail/coin-announce/attachments/20051116/e5e09185/attachment.html