[Rivet] Rivet release details for MCnet summer school

[Andy Buckley]

Hi everyone,

You might have been wondering what happened to that "a release by the
end of the week" thing that we pushed a couple of weeks ago! Well, two
things:

 * I found a horrid memory management bug in the projection handler
which doesn't affect any behaviour but is probably the source of a slow
but persistent memory leak (~100MB over 1M events). I tried to fix this
last week, but despite lots of positive hacking developments in my
working copy I still haven't figured out exactly what's going on.

 * There's no point in releasing a new version, just to end up making a
load of tweaks for the version used at the MCnet summer school at the
end of the month. There's been a steady trickle of script UI and
behavioural improvements since we hit the 1.2.2 beta stage (i.e. since I
made a 1.2.2b tarball!), so I think this has been a good decision.

However, we need to choose the cutoff point for the version to be used
at the MCnet school -- the school will be based on a VM to be installed
on the students' laptops, so the freeze/release needs to happen well in
advance of the school: can the tutorial organisers confirm the freeze
date for the VM building?

I'm personally fairly happy to let a release go out without a fix to the
memory bug, since it doesn't affect the observables, and my experience
so far indicates that it's most likely to be solved by getting several
experienced C++ coders to look through the code together: the MCnet
school itself is the best opportunity for this!

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh