ANN: refdb-0.9.9-pre6 available for testing

Hi,

I've uploaded yet another prerelease for the upcoming 0.9.9
release. If you have some time on your hands, please grab the tarball
here:

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

The focus of this prerelease is the new PHP web interface which
required some additional polish compared to the previous
prerelease. There were also some fixes required in the clients and in
refdbd to make everything work as smoothly as possible. The full list
of changes is attached below. I'd greatly appreciate your feedback on
the web interface. I'd like to get this right when we ship it with
0.9.9, so feel free to throw your weirdest data at it.

regards,
Markus

Bugfixes:

- a bug in the tokenizers used by refdbd and by the clients to parse
  command line arguments has been fixed. Now escaped characters should
  be treated as such in all cases.

Improvements:

- the handling of the AV field has been cleaned up. As of this
  version, the AV field should only contain a physical location,
  i.e. either a description of the location, or a call number. The
  formerly applied PATH: kludge to manage links to local copies of PDF
  files is no longer supported. To store user-specific locations of
  PDF files, use the L1-L4 fields and start the URL with the "file://"
  protocol prefix. These links are assumed to point to local copies
  owned by the user. If the URL uses a relative path, i.e.
    "file://offprints/Miller2002"
  instead of
    "file:///home/markus/offprints/Miller2002"
  (note the additional root slash in the latter URL), the same pdfroot
  mangling is applied as was previously to the AV  - PATH: paths.
  Please see the UPGRADING file for some hints how to efficiently
  migrate existing AV field contents.

- in order to reflect the above change in risx datasets, the risx dtd
  was adapted accordingly. The <link> element is now also allowed in
  <libinfo>. Although the DTD can't enforce this, the pubinfo/link
  elements are supposed to hold publicly accessible URLs of offprints,
  images and such, whereas the libinfo/link elements should receive
  only user-specific local paths to offprints.

- if a character encoding conversion is necessary during data import
  or data export, refdbd now uses the transliteration facility of iconv
  for characters which cannot be mapped to the target encoding, a
  problem which often arises when exporting UTF-8 data to European
  encodings.

- the new PHP web interface was thoroughly overhauled to cope with
  whitespace, apostrophes, and regular expression characters in
  keywords, author names, and journal names. Adding references now works
  from risx data too, and the feedback about the success of adding a
  file has been improved. Adding data from the web form was improved too
  in that empty fields are left out, author name and keyword lists are
  appropriately tokenized, and addref or updateref is used whenever
  appropriate. The code now makes sure to use a unique temporary filename
  which is deleted again afterwards, avoiding clutter in your /tmp. The
  field descriptions of the Add reference form was overhauled too to better
  reflect the contents depending on which reference type is used. The month
  selector now creates a numeric month to comply with the RIS format's
  requirements.


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


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