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30th October 2017

OpenFOAM v5.0 | Patch Releases

Today we released patched versions of the openfoam5 pack for the following versions of Ubuntu Linux, 64 bit:

  • 14.04 LTS, codename trusty
  • 16.04 LTS, codename xenial
  • 17.04, codename zesty
  • 17.10, codename artful
  • 18.04 LTS, codename bionic (from 1 Jun 2018)

See the Download v5.0 | Ubuntu page for installation and upgrade instructions.

The packs can be installed or upgraded on Windows 10 and have been used to update the installations for other Linux and macOS platforms that use Docker to provide a self-contained environment, see Download v5.0 | Linux and Download v5.0 | macOS.

Source of the Patched Packs

The OpenFOAM Foundation maintains two public repositories of source code of OpenFOAM:

OpenFOAM-5.x provides the source code for the patched openfoam5 packs.  The packs use the packaging date as the minor version number, allowing users to refer to the repository for included code fixes.  The installed version can be checked by typing:

apt-cache policy openfoam5

This produces the following output for the patched version released today

openfoam5:
  Installed: 20171030
  Candidate: 20171030
  Version table:
 *** 20171030 500
        500 http://dl.openfoam.org/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0-1 500
        500 http://dl.openfoam.org/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages

The user can then refer to the repository commit log at 30 Oct 2017 corresponding to the package date 20171030.

Replacing the “dot-1” Release

In past versions of OpenFOAM, we released a “dot-1” version, e.g. OpenFOAM-5.1, a few months after the release of the major version, i.e. 5.0.  The rationale was that the dot-1 version contained code fixes to a large number of issues reported following a new version release.  The timing of the dot-1 version release was based on issue reports falling to the background level.

Today the development line is maintained publicly to “always-releasable” quality.  Issues are continuously reported and resolved, such that we no longer see a sharp rise in reported issues following release of a major version.  The dot-1 version is therefore an anachronism, not relevant to our development of OpenFOAM today.  Instead, we plan to release updated openfoam5 packs, compiled from the latest OpenFOAM-5.x sources, approximately once per month.