[GAP Forum] GAP 4.8.7 release announcement

[Alexander Konovalov]

Dear GAP Forum,

This is to announce the release of GAP 4.8.7, which could be downloaded from

	http://www.gap-system.org/Releases/

The only two changes in the core GAP system made in this release are:

* Fixed regression from GAP 4.7.6 when reading compressed files after a 
workspace is loaded. Before the fix, if GAP is started with the -L option 
(load workspace), using ReadLine on the input stream for a compressed file 
returned by InputTextFile only returned the first character. [Reported by 
Bill Allombert]

* Fixed compiler warning occurring when GAP is compiled with gcc 6.2.0. 
[Reported by Bill Allombert]

For the corresponding changes in the source code, see the GAP 4.8.7 milestone
on GitHub: 

	https://github.com/gap-system/gap/milestone/13?closed=1

Furthermore, GAP 4.8.7 distribution includes updates for 21 GAP package:

AutoDoc                    | 2016.12.04 | 04/12/2016 
AutPGrp                    | 1.8        | 25/11/2016 
Digraphs                   | 0.7.1      | 22/03/2017
Example                    | 3.5.1      | 04/02/2017 
FactInt                    | 1.5.4      | 13/02/2017  
float                      | 0.7.5      | 18/02/2017
FR                         | 2.4.1      | 09/02/2017 
gpd                        | 1.46       | 21/02/2017
HAP                        | 1.11.15    | 21/02/2017
HeLP                       | 3.1        | 12/01/2017 
kbmag                      | 1.5.4      | 01/02/2017 
OpenMath                   | 11.4.2     | 28/02/2017
profiling                  | 1.3.0      | 23/02/2017  
qaos                       | 1.4        | 15/11/2016
RCWA                       | 4.5.1      | 13/03/2017
ResClasses                 | 4.6.0      | 12/02/2017
SCSCP                      | 2.2.2      | 28/02/2017 
Toric                      | 1.9.4      | 07/03/2017 
Utils                      | 0.46       | 08/02/2017 
XMod                       | 2.59       | 21/03/2017

and a new package 'lpres' (author: René Hartung, maintainer: Laurent Bartholdi) 
to work with L-presented groups, namely groups given by a finite generating set
and a possibly infinite set of relations given as iterates of finitely many seed
relations by a finite set of endomorphisms. The package implements nilpotent 
quotient, Todd-Coxeter and Reidemeister-Schreier algorithms for such groups.

We encourage all users to upgrade to GAP 4.8.7.

Just in case, a common pitfall during GAP installation on Linux and macOS is to 
compile only the GAP kernel, but not the packages. This procedure had changed 
less than a year ago (in GAP 4.8.4), so let me remind you that after running 

./configure
make

in the GAP root directory you need to change to the 
'pkg' subdirectory and call

../bin/BuildPackages.sh

to run the script which will build most of the packages that require 
compilation (provided sufficiently many libraries, headers and tools 
are available).

If you need any help or would like to report any problems, please do 
not hesitate to contact us at support at gap-system.org, or submit new 
issues on GitHub: 

	https://github.com/gap-system/gap/issues

There is also a 'gap' tag for questions about GAP at the 
Mathematics Q&A site:

   http://math.stackexchange.com/tags/gap/info

In addition, you may find some GAP related news on Twitter:

   http://twitter.com/gap_system 

(you may also read the GAP Twitter feed at http://www.gap-system.org).


Wishing you fun and success using GAP,

Alexander Konovalov
on behalf of the GAP Group