Beast 0.12.0-beta.1

[Tim Janik <timj gnu org>]

It's one of those late nighters again but now it's finally out.
The first pre-release candidate for Beast 0.12.0 is up and
the binary package upload is still ongoing as I'm writing this:

  https://beast.testbit.org/pub/testing/beast-0.12.0-beta.1.tar.xz
  https://beast.testbit.org/pub/deb/beast_0.12.0~beta.1+20.gac2f0b3_amd64.deb

This release removes the Rapicorn dependency as well as the
runtime dependency on CPython. To achieve that, a number of
utilities from Rapicorn has to be integrated, which has made the
code base a fair bit larger:

  639 files changed, 75204 insertions(+), 44290 deletions(-)

Most notably, this is the first release that installs the new
ebeast UI. Tracks, piano rolls and dB meters are already displayed,
but not much beyond that as it's still in pre-alpha stage.
However it's a good showcase for our future UI direction, you can
start it and take a quick look with:

  $prefix/beast-0-12/bin/ebeast

Please file any bugs you encounter in the Beast bug tracker:

  https://github.com/tim-janik/beast/issues/

Appended you'll find the release NEWS in detail.

Beast 0.12.0-beta.1:

* EBEAST: development of a new user interface based on Electronjs has
  started and the first (pre-alpha) bits are shipped and installed
  with this release under $prefix/beast-0-12/bin/ebeast.
* EBEAST: added About, Tracks with dB meters, Parts with thumbnails.
* EBEAST: added Play controls, Piano roll, color picker palette.
* Upgrade to Electron-1.8, Vue-2.5, Chrome-59.0, V8-5.9, Node-8.2.
* Added internal integrity tests.
* Added various documentation improvements.
* Fixed memory corruption crash, #25. [stw]
* Fixed fluid synth test on Bionic, #42. [stw]
* Fixed crash when adding mixer bus during playback. [stw]
* Merged and enhanced the new Beast IDL layer AIDA.
* Introduced asynchronous Events to replace signals.
* Removed all C procedures, migrated method calls to Aida IDL.
* Removed large chunks of old and outdated code.
* Integrated required utilities from Rapicorn.
* Removed Rapicorn as build and runtime dependency.
* Removed Python runtime dependency.
* Work around apport reporting assertion tests.
* Handle UTF-8 mixed with Latin-1 gracefully.
* Renamed Demos/, Effects/, etc resource directories.
* Added shared memory allocator with external bookkeeping (without
  boundary tags). Communicate dB meter levels and other values via
  shared memory between DSP engine and UI code.
* Continued migration of C structs to C++ classes.
* Adjusted remote reference GC for Beast work loads.
* Added ANSI colors to logging output for non-dumb terminals.
* Reduced libbse.so size down to 14% by splitting debug syms.
* Clarified licensing, Beast is released under LGPL-2.1+.
* Adapted code to depend on and make use of C++14.
* Fixed code to compile cleanly with g++-7.2.


-- 
Yours sincerely,
Tim Janik

https://testbit.eu/timj
Free software author.