F-VIPGI: a new adapted version of VIPGI for FORS2 spectroscopy.
  Application to a sample of 16 X-ray selected galaxy clusters at 0.6 < z < 1.2
  The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we present F-VIPGI, a new version
of the VIMOS Interactive Pipeline and Graphical Interface (VIPGI) adapted to
handle FORS2 spectroscopic data. Secondly, we investigate the
spectro-photometric properties of a sample of galaxies residing in distant
X-ray selected galaxy clusters, the optical spectra of which were reduced with
this new pipeline. We provide basic technical information about the innovations
of the new software and, as a demonstration of the capabilities of the new
pipeline, we show results obtained for 16 distant (0.65 < z < 1.25) X-ray
luminous galaxy clusters selected within the XMM-Newton Distant Cluster
Project. We performed a spectral indices analysis of the extracted optical
spectra of their members, based on which we created a library of composite high
signal-to-noise ratio spectra representative of passive and star-forming
galaxies residing in distant galaxy clusters. The spectroscopic templates are
provided to the community in electronic form. By comparing the
spectro-photometric properties of our templates with the local and distant
galaxy population residing in different environments, we find that passive
galaxies in clusters appear to be well evolved already at z = 0.8 and even more
so than the field galaxies at similar redshift. Even though these findings
would point toward a significant acceleration of galaxy evolution in densest
environments, we cannot exclude the importance of the mass as the main
evolutionary driving element either. The latter effect may indeed be justified
by the similarity of our composite passive spectrum with the luminous red
galaxies template at intermediate redshift.
