ANN: refdb-0.9.9-pre3 available for testing

Hi all,

I've uploaded another prerelease for the upcoming version 0.9.9 of
RefDB. As always, the tarball is available here:

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

The focus of this prerelease is a cleanup of the internal data
representation which was moved away from the RIS mess towards a more
sane part/publication/series approach. While at it, I've also improved
the handling of the M1-M3 fields which contain a lot of reference
type-specific information like conference location, sender and
recipient of an email message, running time of movies and so on. These
fields are internally represented according to what they stand
for. This both simplifies the data export to non-RIS/risx formats, and
it also makes the contents of these fields available for the citation
styles. The citestylex.dtd was changed accordingly. Due to the changes
in the internal representation of authors and titles, you may have to
apply some minor fixes to any styles that you have written yourself.
The details are described in the file UPGRADING. A full list of the
changes is appended below.

As both the main database schema and the reference database schema
were changed, it is recommended to re-create both from scratch instead
of trying to upgrade them. Export your reference data and citation
styles with your existing RefDB setup, then upgrade, and add your
data again.

There's only a few more things on my todo list, so this prerelease
contains most functionality of what you can expect in 0.9.9. I'd
appreciate if you could spend some time testing this prerelease.

regards,
Markus

Bugfixes:

- crash during bibliography creation on OS X was fixed

- unknown reference data types are now changed to "GEN" when importing
  risx data as well

- abbreviated journal names which use periods without spaces are now
  imported properly

- config.rpath was added to the tarball to avoid configure errors on
  particular OSes

- upgrading the main database no longer creates duplicate entries in
  t_meta when using PostgreSQL as the database engine

- fixed missing permissions after upgrading the main PostgreSQL database

- the preconfigured locations of log and pid files now honor the
  prefix (usually /usr or /usr/local)


Improvements:

- the internal representation of authors and titles is now based on
  the three-level library system (part, publication, series) instead of
  on the once-and-for-all-screwed RIS definition. This makes both the
  programmer's life and the style author's life quite a bit easier

- the internal representation of the M1-M3 fields was improved to
  simplify data access. The contents of these RIS fields is now stored
  in separate fields which reflect the purpose in context of the
  respective reference type

- citation styles now support both authors and editors in monographic data

- citation styles now support the replacements of the M1-M3 fields,
  i.e. stuff like conference location, sender and recipient email
  addresses, class codes, running time and so on

- the output of adduser/deleteuser was cleaned up if no hostname is
  available

- the format specifier NX of the getref command no longer retrieves
  all extended notes associated with a particular reference, as these
  would always include the users reference lists. If you positively want
  those lists, use ALL or NXNL instead.

- the citestylex.dtd now supports different formatting options for
  authors (TEXT) and editors (TEXTED). The styles shipped with RefDB
  were updated accordingly.

- all backends were updated and now export the contents of the RIS
  fields M1-M3 as far as possible

- two new citation styles were added (Tissue_Eng. and Biomaterials)

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


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