[GAP Forum] Important news for users and installers of GRAPE

[Leonard Soicher]

Dear GAP Forum,

I am pleased to announce that the new version 4.7 of GRAPE is included
in the recently released GAP 4.8.2. All users and installers of GRAPE
should read this email in its entirety.

The main new feature of GRAPE 4.7 is that the user may run their own
separately installed copy of bliss or nauty or nauty/traces rather
than using the included version of nauty 2.2 included
in GRAPE 4.7.  How to do this is described in Chapter 1 of the GRAPE
4.7 manual.  Please note that the nauty interface for GRAPE 4.7 has
only been extensively tested with the included version 2.2 of nauty,
and the bliss interface has only been tested with version 0.73 of bliss.

The interface to bliss was originally written by Jerry James (who I
thank), who modified and packaged GRAPE 4.6.1 as a Fedora package
(in Fedora 22, 23 and 24) to use bliss instead of nauty, due to Fedora
licensing rules. Unfortunately, there were some bugs in this initial
interface, which could cause wrong results to be returned.  This interface
was fixed for inclusion in GRAPE 4.7 and I am pleased to see that now
there are Fedora package versions of GRAPE 4.7 for Fedora 23 and 24,
but I have not tried them and would appreciate any feedback you have
on those Fedora package versions. However, please note that I can only
guarantee support for official versions of GRAPE obtained either from
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~leonard/grape/ 
or as part of the official GAP distribution downloaded from 
http://www.gap-system.org

The user should test any installation of GRAPE 4.7 (and its
interface to bliss or nauty or nauty/traces) using the new
GRAPE testfile. In GAP, the command
Test(Filename(DirectoriesPackageLibrary("grape","tst"),"testall.tst"));
should return the value true. 

I wish you happy computing with GRAPE 4.7!

Regards,
Leonard