[cad-linux] BRL-CAD 7.2.4 Released

We are once again happy to announce that BRL-CAD 7.2.4 is now 
available.  BRL-CAD is a mature high-performance cross-platform open 
source solid modeling system. This release of BRL-CAD includes many 
build and bug fixes for several platforms including the changes listed 
below as well as feature enhancements requested by users for the vrml 
exporter and the numerical root solver.  You can post feature requests 
to the "Request For Enhancement" section of the project site at 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640805

The release marks the beginning of a series of benchmark suite 
enhancements.  The BRL-CAD benchmark is a cache and CPU intensive test 
of your system's performance, using a real application metric of 
ray-tracing and by comparing your results to various machines over the 
past 20 years.  The benchmark suite will now iteratively increase the 
number of rays being shot until a minimum amount of time has elapsed 
per render.  The resulting computations provide a more stable ray-trace 
figure of merit (rtfm) and allows the benchmark tests to scale to 
increasingly higher-performance machines without requiring 
intervention.  The current default testing time window minimum of 60 
seconds elapsed wallclock time implies that the benchmark suite will 
now take about 15 minutes to complete.

The list of changes since release 7.2.2 includes the following:

* fixed libbu run-time memory corruption checking
* prevent indirect OpenGL framebuffers from crashing
* throttle cpu usage on lingering OpenGL framebuffers
* uniform binary objects from partial file data
* added libwdb interface to uniform binary objects
* fixed mged help for whichid, whatid, and whichair
* fixed dsp primitive bug when using binary objects
* fixed tabsub 64bit filesystem file read bug
* vrml-g now writes out DEF names for exported shapes
* updated manual pages with new contact details
* iterative scalable benchmark computations
* added logging of ray details when root solver fails
* added logging of solid name when root solver fails
* build now includes a termlib library
* fixed smp linux rtarea calculation bug
* fixed rtweight centimeter units computation bug
* fixed asc2g double-free warnings bug
* added rtarea manpage documentation
* fixed compilation support for Solaris
* removed redirection usage examples in g2asc docs

This version is fully backwards compatible with the previous release of 
BRL-CAD.  Binaries are posted for Mac OS X, Linux (ia32, ia64, and 
amd64), FreeBSD (ia32), Solaris (sparc), and IRIX.  Please visit the 
Sourceforge project website to download the latest version: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/

BRL-CAD is a powerful constructive solid geometry solid modeling system 
that includes an interactive geometry editor, ray tracing support for 
rendering and geometric analysis, network distributed framebuffer 
support, image and signal-processing tools.  There are over 400 
command-line tools, utilities, and converters as well as a graphical 
solid modeler, mged.

See the BRL-CAD website at http://brlcad.org/ for documentation, 
support, and more information.

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