Go HEP release 0.12.0

Release v0.12.0 is fresh from the oven.

This release is the first one to introduce preliminary support for vgo, the official Go way to handle versioning. vgo is still in flux: the first Go version with experimental opt-in support should be Go 1.11 (to be released in August 2018.) Obviously, on the Go-HEP side, adjustments will probably still be required as the user story solidifies and experience is accumulated.

Nonetheless, it is still an interesting new development!

geo/gdml

This release adds preliminary support for parsing Geometry Description Markup Language (GDML) files, a de facto standard for describing (detector) geometries. The documentation for this new package is here: geo/gdml.

Help wanted and (gladly) accepted to get this package in a shape where it could be used for detailed detector studies! This is tracked here:

• https://github.com/go-hep/hep/projects/4

hplot

hplot was slightly updated to cope with an interesting development percolating from upstream gonum/plot, namely: the migration to a new PDF backend that allows to embed fonts inside the output PDF file. No more PDFs that display weirdly on foreign computer. Yay!

This obviously means the resulting PDF files may be quite larger than with previous versions. (You can’t have your cake and eat it.) You can use vgpdf.Canvas.EmbedFonts to get the old behaviour.

rootio

This release adds preliminary support for chaining multiple rootio.Trees into a logical view: the famed rootio.Chain.

Mohamed Amine El Gnaoui (a.k.a @maloft), our new summer student @LPC-Clermont, provided the initial implementation: thanks! More tests and benchmarks improvements yet to come :)

Another noteworthy change: rootio/cmd/root-srv dropped its dependency against github.com/satori/go.uuid in favor of github.com/pborman/uuid. The latter exposes a more stable API.

xrootd

This release adds yet another new package: xrootd. This package will provide (eventually) a pure-Go implementation of an XRootD client as well as a server.

Mikhail Ivchenko (a.k.a @EgorMatirov), our Google Summer of Code 2018 student has been already hard at work, providing support for:

• the initial xrootd client,
• the handshake with an XRootD-compliant server (C++ or otherwise), and
• the protocol and login requests/responses.

The dirlist request/response is already in the pipe.