It has finally happened!

• RSF/Madagascar was publicly announced today in Vienna, and a stable version was released on Sourceforge.
  The stable version has vplot pens (vppen, pspen, xtpen, and ppmpen) integrated to make Madagascar a self-contained package. The vplot part may contain some bugs and is a temporary solution at best because of the licensing issues. Thanks to Joe Dellinger for permission to use his codes and for helping to integrate and test them!
• Please check out the RSF Camp web page. A registration form is provided. The School and workshop program will be added in July.

In preparation for the glorious public release at the EAGE workshop on open-source software, Madagascar finds a new (and hopefully permanent) home at Sourceforge. Its brand new web page is rsf.sf.net/ (note: moved to reproducibility.org in October 2008), and the Sourceforge project page is http://sf.net/projects/rsf/.

If you have been accessing codes in the Subversion repository, please cd to your installation and run

svn switch --relocate http://egl.beg.utexas.edu/svn/rsf https://rsf.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rsf

Your svn program should be compiled with SSL support in order to access an https URL. Please register with Sourceforge and send me your account name if you would like to be added to the developer list.

RSF is a meanigless abbreviation that nobody can remember. We do need a better name for the package. I suggest Madagascar and can justify it scientifically.

I had a brilliant idea to look up RSF in the international airport codes. It turns out that there is no airport with RSF as the code. However, there is RSE (Sydney Rose Bay in Australia) and RSG (Serra Pelada in Brazil). Logically, RSF must be in between. The exact geographical center between RSE and RSG, with the high probability of being in the middle of the ocean, happens to fall on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar will be easy for everyone to remember because of the movie. We can use one of the island’s unique creatures (lemur, tenrec, fossa) for the logo. Madagascar is a symbol of isolation, which is a reminder of what RSF does not want to be. Comments?