[CIG-ALL] Gale 2.0.0

[Walter Landry]

Greetings,

I am pleased to announce the release of Gale 2.0.0, a finite element
code for the long term tectonics community.  The main feature of this
release is support for elements with much better numerical properties
than were previously available.  Other new features include a simpler,
clearer input format, an equation parser, and fixes for thermal
advection/diffusion.  Everyone is encouraged to upgrade.  The release
notes are attached below.

You can download binaries or the source code from

   http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/gale/

Installation instructions are in the bundled README and INSTALL files.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
walter at geodynamics.org

2.0.0
----------------------------------

* The main feature of this release is the support for Quadratic (Q2)
  and discontinuous linear (P-1) elements.

* JSON is the new recommended format for input files.  It works by
  converting the JSON files to XML, so existing XML files will
  continue to work with minor changes.  See the file UPGRADE for
  details.

* Gale now includes an equation parser, allowing you to input initial
  conditions, boundary conditions, and shapes much more easily.  As a
  consequence, the existing StandardConditionFunctions and most shapes
  are no longer recommended, though they will continue to work as
  before.

* StressBC now explicitly applies either a shear or normal stress.
  This also fixed a bug when applying a StressBC against a curved
  boundary.

* Thermal diffusion and advection benchmarks have been added.  These
  benchmarks highlighted bugs with thermal evolution which have been
  fixed.

* VTKOutput has been deprecated.  Instead, you should use the XDMF
  files, which work in Paraview and Visit.

* The File input method for initial conditions and boundary conditions
  can now handle 2D and 3D input data.

* Documentation for tracer particles has been added.

* A bug preventing input from multiple File's and a bug from opening
  too many files were fixed.

* The binaries now ship with checkpointing support.

* Gale is little quieter when checkpointing is turned on.

* A C++ compiler is now required to build.

* The recommended visualization tool has been changed to Visit.

* The generate_pvd utility has been removed.  Visit will automatically
  create a movie from a series of XDMF files.

* The vtk2csv.py script has been removed since it does not work with
  the XDMF files.