ANN: refdb-0.9.8-pre9 available

Hi all,

we're approaching the next release 0.9.8 which should provide a couple
of useful enhancements to the general public. I've uploaded a
prerelease which is supposed to be the last one before 0.9.8, unless
there are any problems with this prerelease. In order to avoid the
(almost customary) build problems on platforms other than FreeBSD,
I've set up a SuSE linux test box (SuSE because we already have very
active Debian and Mandriva users on board). I didn't run into any
problems on that system yet.

The prerelease was built from subversion revision 250 and is available
right here:

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/pre/refdb-latest.tar.gz

I've appended the improvements and fixed bugs since 0.9.7
below. Please report any problems to the list to make 0.9.8 a smooth
experience.

regards,
Markus


Bugfixes:

- queries for UR and L1-L4 fields now work again

- en2ris now properly imports the start and end page information from
  newer EndNote versions

- using multiple databases in LaTeX documents now works again properly

- bibtex output is now properly escaped

- getref now honours backslash-escaped apostrophes in query strings

- strings extending the length of limited size fields in t_refdb are
  now properly truncated during data import

- correctly rollback if adding RIS data fails

- exclusive queries (e.g. :UR:!~"http") now work as expected for links
  (UR, L1-L4, authors, and keywords

- refdbd now modifies citation keys containing the string "-ID" as
  this may cause problems when creating bibliographies. "-ID" will be
  replaced with "_ID" to avoid problems.

- if an iconv error occurs during data import, refdbd now returns a
  meaningful error message.


Improvements:

- the refdba:listuser command now checks for the required database
  argument

- improved manpage layout by using new DocBook stylesheet capabilities
  when available, and workarounds for older stylesheet versions

- configure now simplifies the task of building modularized RefDB
  packages. You can now build server, clients, and doc packages
  separately. Additionally, you can switch off building docs and
  manpages to build the RefDB binaries from the SVN sourceson systems
  without an XML/DocBook toolchaiin

- the code that generates citation keys from author names was improved
  by using iconv to transliterate foreign characters. 

- the default setup now uses UTF-8 as the default input, storage, and
  output encoding.

- the wrapper script bib2ris-utf8 was added to simplify postprocessing
  of the bib2ris output with the new refdb_latex2uft8txt script. The
  latter converts foreign characters to their UTF-8 equivalents and
  strips off other LaTeX commands.

- personal reference lists are now implemented on top of extended
  notes. This means in particular that each user can maintain an
  unlimited number of reference lists

- various fixes to the PHP web interface

- use an improved bibtex citation format (\cite{dbname:citekey})

- now supports citation key based citation formats in addition to
  author/year and numeric

- improved citation formats handle more reference types

- refdbd can now install and upgrade the main database without
  external tools. See the file UPGRADING and the refdbd man page for
  further information.

- refdb-init now uses these new refdbd capabilities to simplify the
  initial setup.

- refdbd can also be run to check the database connection and to
  retrieve the database version. This is mainly useful for
  package/ports builders.

- the help messages of the binaries now show the subversion revision
  they were built from. This makes it easier to track down bugs to
  specific builds.

- refdbd can now run from a single main+reference database to allow
  the installation on cheap web space with access to a single MySQL
  database.

- RefDB now provides frequency data for various statistical
  purposes. The get{au|ed|as|kw|jo|jf|j1|j2} commands allow to display
  the absolute number of references that use the particular item, or a
  relative number between 0 and 10

- The xhtml output of getref and checkref now contain frequency
  data. If you view the output with a new optional stylesheet, the
  authors, journal names, and keywords will be displayed according to
  their frequency in terms of font size and colour, similar to the tag
  clouds in services like del.icio.us.

- getref and get{au|ed|as|kw|jo|jf|j1|j2} now support a new option -N
  limit[:offset] to cut down on the number of returned datasets. This
  feature can be conveniently used to loop over the result set in
  e.g. increments of 5 or 10, a feature most useful for graphical
  frontends.


-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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