Date: November 25, 2015
From: Bob Jacobsen
Subject: Test version 4.1.4 of JMRI/DecoderPro is available for download.
This is a test release. Please post a note if you encounter any new or old bugs! And please back up your JMRI files before installing this, in case you want to go back to an earlier version.
This is the next in a series of test versions. We expect this series to end in the next JMRI production release around the end of 2015.
Some of the changes involved are quite extensive. They may require a certain amount of experience before they are working well. Therefore, this test version should be considered experimental.
JMRI is now only available under the GNU General Public License. For more information, please see our copyright and licensing page.
There's a problem with opening roster entries with certain programmer types if you're using a language other than English. For example, when the program is set to French language, it won't open the Comprehensive programmer. This has been fixed in the development builds. As a (not very good) workaround, please leave the program set to English.
Once you've configured one or more connections, you get various errors if you try to remove them and run JMRI without a connection. This has been improved, but not entirely fixed, in the development builds. As a workaround, you can create a new profile without any connections.
Backgrounds to labels and icons on control panels will occasionally display incorrectly. Memory variable icons may also display an "X" marker at incorrect times. This is fixed in JMRI 4.1.5.
If any of those effect you, please either wait for JMRI 4.1.5, due out in early December, or pick up a development build installer from Jenkins.
The Digitrax PR2 does not work with this release. If you need to work with a PR2, please stay with JMRI 4.1.3 or earlier, or wait for JMRI 4.3.1 which should appear in December 2015.
The configuration is now stored in multiple files within a directory named profile inside a
Configuration Profile instead of within the file ProfileConfig.xml. PanelPro and DecoderPro both should migrate from the old configuration to the new configuration seamlessly. See JMRI Issue #69 for more details. Please report any issues at our GitHub project.
The XML schema for decoder files has been made more precise. This shouldn't effect people who just use the JMRI decoder definitions as distributed, because they all work with this more precise version. But if you have decoder definitions of your own, you may have to update them. Specifically, the decoder file verification will now reject a few things that it didn't catch before, even though they didn't really work:
As a side effect of checking this, the qualifier elements inside a variable now have to be at the front of the contents, and the label, comment and tooltip elements have to be at the back. You can't just sprinkle them around and hope the code finds them (because sometimes in the past the program would miss one; now we require an order we're sure the code will understand).
This is the second JMRI version build from our shiny new GitHub repository. For more information on this, please see our documentation page.
Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan requires signed drivers for USB adapters. If you've upgraded from an earlier version, your drivers may not work. That will cause JMRI to throw errors when it doesn't find communications links. To fix this, go to the website for your adapter manufacturer, find the drivers that are listed to work with Mac OS X 10.9 or later, download, and install, then retry JMRI again.
RFID readers using the Olimex protocol were incorrectly decoding tag values - this has now been fixed. If you were using Olimex RFID readers with earlier versions, your existing ID Tag database will contain invalid tags. New ID Tag entries will be generated for each correctly read tag - this will require that any additional information be re-entered and, optionally, old invalid entries manually deleted.
Jython has been upgraded to version 2.7.0 with the following potentially breaking changes:
java.io.IOException: Mark invalid error, set "jython.exec=true" in a custom python.properties file or rewrite the script to be less than 100,000 characters per file. Note that when using "jython.exec=true" it may be desirable to run the included script jmri_bindings.py as a startup action to emulate the evaluation environment used when jython.exec=false.Decoder definitions that use the "ivariable" form are now deprecated. Definitions included with this release have been converted to the new form. If you have decoder definitions with the older "ivariable" form, they will no longer validate, but can still be used for the first couple of test releases in this series. Please ask on the JMRI Users group for help converting them, or just drop them and use the current definitions.
The OpenLCB 0.6.4 library in this version has a bug in its alias calculations which prevents JMRI from communicating occasionally. A patch has been submitted to the OpenLCB group. In the meantime, the workaround is to restart JMRI and/or the node and try again; that might allocate different alias values.
Please use these links for downloading:
The XML schema for decoder files has been made more precise. See the warning above for more on the implications of this.
profile inside a Configuration Profile instead of within the file ProfileConfig.xml. PanelPro and DecoderPro both should migrate from the old configuration to the new configuration seamlessly. See Issue #69 for more details.