Dear ObsPy users,
just in time for the holidays, the ObsPy development team is proud to announce the release of a new ObsPy version (currently 0.8.3), which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. The most rigorous change is the conjunction / merge of the modular, multi-package ObsPy infrastructure into a single package. This will ease up the installation process significantly.
The easiest installation path for ObsPy is via the Windows Installer, the MacOS X application (for 10.6 and 10.7, 10.8 is untested) and the Debian/Ubuntu repository. All have been updated to the newest ObsPy version.
The new ObsPy package is also part of the Python Package Index (http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=display&name=obspy) and can be installed via easy_install (easy_install obspy) or pip (pip install obspy). Due to the new internal structure, please make sure to remove all previously installed ObsPy packages. That is remove packages from the directory /path/to/python2.X/lib/python2.X/site-packages/ and entries in the easy_install.pth file in the same directory or use "pip uninstall".
Some notable new features:
(1) Restructuring into a single ObsPy package
(2) Move of development from SVN to Git on Github (https://github.com/obspy/obspy). This makes it much easier to take part in and actively contribute to the ObsPy project.
(3) Dropping Python 2.5 support
(4) Most important classes/functions can now be imported directly from the top-level namespace, e.g. "from obspy import ...". This currently works for the read() and readEvents() functions and the Trace, Stream, and UTCDateTime objects. The old way of importing still work just as well.
(5) New class to determine the Flinn-Engdahl region for a given location, contributed by Fabien Engels.
(6) New rotate() method on Streams wrapping the rotate functions in obspy.signal, contributed by Tom Richter. Note that the interface is still experimental and might change in future versions.
For a full list of all new features, bugfixes and other changes from the 0.7.x release, view the changelog at:
https://github.com/obspy/obspy/blob/0.8.3/CHANGELOG.txt
Please report any bug or installation issues either to this mailing list or preferable via the github ticket system that can be reached at http://www.obspy.org.
Best regards,
ObsPy development team