CGAL users discussion list

["Laurent Rineau (GeometryFactory)" <>]

The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.0 
of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.  

CGAL 4.0 differs from version 3.x in licensing, and in functionality.
We increased the major number of the CGAL version to '4' in order to 
reflect this license change. 

The license has been changed from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3+
(GNU Lesser General Public License) and from QPL (Q Public License v1.0)
to GPLv3+ (GNU Public License), depending on each package.
These license changes are not fundamental, that is, the licenses
are similar in their spirit, and the change reflects the fact
that the QPL has become marginal, since it had been introduced
and later abandoned for Qt.


Major changes in this release include the following:

o Linear Cell Complex (new package)

  This package implements linear cell complexes, objects in
  dimension d  with linear geometry. They are based on the
  Combinatorial Map where points are associated to vertices.


o 2D Voronoi Diagram Adaptor (temporarily removed)

  As the copyright holder of this package has not granted
  the right to switch from QPL to GPL, this package is
  temporarily removed from the distribution. 
 

o 2D and 3D Alpha Shapes

  Make it more robust for the Exact_predicates_inexact_constructions_kernel


o AABB Tree, Spatial Searching
 
  Queries on these data structures are now multi-thread safe.


o Surface Reconstruction from Point Sets,
  Planar Parameterization of Triangulated Surface Meshes, 
  Approximation of Ridges and Umbilics on Triangulated Surface Meshes, and
  Estimation of Local Differential Properties of Point-Sampled Surfaces

  If you use the Eigen library (http://eigen.tuxfamily.org), 
  these packages no longer need Taucs, Lapack or Blas.



See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.


The CGAL project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust,
easy-to-use, and efficient C++ software library of geometric data
structures and algorithms, like
- triangulations (2D constrained triangulations and Delaunay
  triangulations in 2D and 3D, periodic triangulations),
- Voronoi diagrams (for 2D and 3D points, 2D additively weighted
  Voronoi diagrams, and segment Voronoi diagrams),
- Boolean operations on polygons and polyhedra,
- regularized Boolean operations on polygons with curved arcs
- arrangements of curves,
- mesh generation (2D, 3D and surface mesh generation,
  surface mesh subdivision and parametrization),
- alpha shapes (in 2D and 3D),
- convex hull algorithms (in 2D, 3D and dD),
- operations on polygons (straight skeleton and offset polygon),
- search structures (kd trees for nearest neighbor search, and
  range and segment trees),
- interpolation (natural neighbor interpolation and placement of
  streamlines),
- optimization algorithms (smallest enclosing sphere of points or
  spheres, smallest enclosing ellipsoid of points, principal
  component analysis),
- kinetic data structures




Some modules are distributed under the terms of the LGPL Open Source
license (GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later versions).
Most modules are distributed under the terms of the GPL Open Source
license (GNU General Public License v3 or later versions).
If your intended usage does not meet the criteria of the
aforementioned licenses, a commercial license can be purchased from
GeometryFactory (http://www.geometryfactory.com/).


For further information and for downloading the library and its
documentation, please visit the CGAL web site: http://www.cgal.org/



-- 
Laurent Rineau, PhD
R&D Engineer at GeometryFactory           http://www.geometryfactory.com/
Release Manager of the CGAL Project       http://www.cgal.org/