[GAP Forum] GAP 4.8.5 release announcement

[Alexander Konovalov]

Dear GAP Forum,

This is to announce the release of GAP 4.8.5, which could be downloaded from

  http://www.gap-system.org/Releases/

An overview of the changes introduced in GAP 4.8.5 is provided below. A more 
detailed version with hyperlinks to documentation is available here: 

  http://www.gap-system.org/Manuals/doc/changes/chap2.html#X84E1F4618181F6A3


Improved and extended functionality:

* The error messages produced when an unexpected fail is returned were made 
more clear by explicitly telling that the result should not be boolean or 
fail (before it only said "not a boolean").

* For consistency, both NrTransitiveGroups and TransitiveGroup now disallow 
the transitive group of degree 1.


Fixed bugs that could lead to incorrect results:

* A bug in the code for algebraic field extensions over non-prime fields 
that may cause, for example, a list of all elements of the extension not 
being a duplicate-free. [Reported by Huta Gana]

* So far, FileString only wrote files of sizes less than 2G and did not 
indicate an error in case of larger strings. Now strings of any length 
can be written, and in the case of a failure the corresponding system 
error is shown.


Fixed bugs that could lead to break loops:

* NaturalHomomorphismByIdeal was not reducing monomials before forming 
a quotient ring, causing a break loop on some inputs. [Reported by 
Dmytro Savchuk]

* A bug in DefaultInfoHandler a break loop on startup with the setting
SetUserPreference( "InfoPackageLoadingLevel", 4 ). [Reported by Mathieu 
Dutour]

* The Iterator for permutation groups was broken when the StabChainMutable 
of the group was not reduced, which can reasonably happen as the result 
of various algorithms.


In addition, GAP 4.8.5 distribution includes updates for 5 GAP packages,
namely Cubefree, Digraphs, float, loops and SglPPow.

We encourage all users to upgrade to GAP 4.8.5. 

Just in case, a common pitfall during GAP installation on Linux and OS X
is to compile only the GAP kernel, but not GAP packages. This procedure 
had changed recently (in GAP 4.8.4) so just in case let me remind you 
that after running 

./configure
make

in the GAP root directory you need to change to the 
'pkg' subdirectory and call

../bin/BuildPackages.sh

to run the script which will build most of the packages that require 
compilation (provided sufficiently many libraries, headers and tools 
are available).

If you need any help or would like to report any problems, please do 
not hesitate to contact us at support at gap-system.org or submit new 
issues on GitHub: 

	https://github.com/gap-system/gap/issues


Wishing you fun and success using GAP,

The GAP Group