Known bugs and fixes in McStas

Known (potential) problems

The CVS release may already include a fix for the problems below. Monitor the remaining bugs in our McZilla (Bugzilla for McStas).

Important note for all users: The scilab 3.1 version seems to cause troubles. We rather encourage to use Scilab 4.0.
Important note for Windows users:

It is a known problem that some of the McStas tools do not support filenames / directories with spaces. We are working on a more general approach to this problem, which will hopefully be solved in the next release.
mcdisplay with Scilab: The number of neutrons must be lower than 1000 when using Trace mode

mcdisplay with Scilab: it is not possible to rotate the 3D view using the 'Rot' button in the scilab graphics window. The 'Alpha' and 'Theta' angles from the Dialog should be used instead.
Use our automatic installer to solve most of the Windows platform problems.
A bug in McStas 1.12 prevents doing optimization from mcgui on Windows, which always selects --ncount=1e6. To remedy the problem, please replace your c:\McStas\bin\mcrun.pl with this version.

Matlab 6.5/copyfile may be buggy and make mcplot crash. See note from Mathworks copyfile bug report and its workaround. You may possibly define a new copyfile function with

  function [success, OSMessage]=copyfile(src,dest)
  if ispc
  [Status, OSMessage] = dos(['copy ' src ' '  dest]);
  elseif isunix
  [Status, OSMessage] = unix(['cp -r ' src ' ' dest]);
  end
  success = ~Status;

Mcplot with scilab may encounter problems when exporting directly into a GIF file (e.g. using the mcplot <instr> -gif, -eps, ... options) and reports an error about "xinit"
mcplot/'open McStas sim' menu item (scilab/matlab) may fail when importing file
the scilab full text output format (--format=Scilab) is limited to monitors having, say, less than 50 columns. For large monitors, rather use --format=Scilab_binary
The maximum number of lines allowed in a component is 50000 lines.
All variables declared in the DECLARE section are by default global. It means that conflicts may occur if the same variable name is used in two different components or if the same component is used repeatedly in an instrument. When coding a component, variables that may cause conflicts should therefore be defined as OUTPUT PARAMETERS. For further information, see the McStas manual,.

In case you find problems apart from those listed, please report to McZilla and McStas mailinglist or the McStas responsible.
Bugs & Fixes for older releases:

The list of corrected bugs (prior to McStas 1.4)
Notes on compilation problems
Notes on compiling McStas simulations
A note on graphical debugging in McStas

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Last Modified: Tuesday, 14-Oct-2008 15:56:05 CEST