[Rivet] Rivet 1.2.0 released

[Andy Buckley]

The long-awaited 1.2.0 release of Rivet has finally been made. When we
decided back in October that it might take a month or so to make a quick
release we had no idea what we were getting into -- indeed, back in June
we thought that the next release would not be long! However, the quality
of the system is once again greatly improved and I'm very happy to
recommend Rivet 1.2.0 for immediate use.

This release adds many new analyses, bug-fixes many existing ones, and
adds many more improvements and features to the system. The analysis and
plotting "metadata" system has been primarily moved from the code to
external data files, making analysis code more lightweight; the run
energy is now known at the initialisation phase, also making analysis
code shorter and more comprehensible for multi-energy analyses; the
analysis plugin mechanism is much less intrusive than before; and most
hard-coded normalisations have been removed, having been replaced by a
post-processing script for flexible rescalings and normalisations. This
latter point means that cross-section information in input HepMC records
is now highly recommended, and we encourage all users to use HepMC 2.05
and higher for this reason.

In the interests of quality control, all analyses have been re-validated
and marked as such. Analyses currently considered unvalidated are
relegated to a plugin library not built by default. If your favourite
analysis has disappeared, please help us to get it back into the
validated set! There are currently 63 validated analyses, covering many
areas of generator validation and including all the reference analyses
currently in use for general-purpose MC generator tuning. Plugin authors
and users should note that the paths searched for analysis plugins
(libraries of the form Rivet*.so) are now specified solely by the
RIVET_ANALYSIS_PATH variable, or the Rivet install lib directory if the
variable is not set. Scripts -- rivet-mkanalysis and rivet-buildplugin
-- are available to help with writing and compiling a new analysis.

Rivet 1.2.0 is recommended for immediate production use. A manual --
documenting use of the system, the standard analyses, and the underlying
mechanisms -- is available in the tarball, on the website
http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/, and will shortly be available for
citation on the arXiv.

Please let us know your experiences using Rivet 1.2.0, send us your
analysis code to be included in future releases, and suggest
improvements by emailing us at rivet at projects.hepforge.org

Best wishes, and thanks to all those who have contributed to this latest
release!

Andy

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