[Refdb-users] ANN: new RefDB release 0.8.4

[Markus H. <hoe...@co...>]

Bugfixes:

- Password encryption bug on PPC Linux (and other PPC OSes?) was fixed

- It is now possible to specify empty variable values with the set
  command in refdba and refdbc

- The RIS backend accidentally returned the value of USER1 for all
  USERX fields and MISC1 for all MISCX fields. This is corrected now.

- The application server now handles SIGCHLD correctly to avoid
  zombies on BSD-style systems.

- refdba and refdbc now correctly pass non-option arguments to the
  command if run in batch mode

- the "'' could not be resolved as hostname" bug in refdbc and refdbib
  was fixed

- a bug in the detection of unabbreviated words in journal names was
  fixed

- a bug in the post-processing of the default_ris variable was fixed

- the address, ISSN, URL, publisher, and city fields are now available
  for display in the screen and HTML backends as well as in the web
  interface

Improvements:

- New refdba functions addword and listword to manage reserved journal
  words

- The getref HTML output now generates output suitable for CSS
  stylesheets. A new command-line option/configuration file variable
  allows to specify the URL of the CSS file to use.

- All RefDB applications now look into /usr/local/etc (or whatever you
  choose as "sysconfdir" during configuration) to find their global
  configuration files. Only if they're not found there, the apps will
  consult $REFDBLIB. The latter is done in order not to break existing
  installations, but you should move your config files to the proper
  location now (unless you really share them between machines). This
  change was made to separate the shareable data in $REFDBLIB from
  machine-specific configuration data.

- Building and installing is now possible from a separate build
  directory

- The script refdb is now suitable for use on both SysV-style and
  BSD-style systems to start and stop the refdbd daemon

Other changes:

- ris.el is now no longer byte-compiled. This simplifies building
  Debian packages and does not really hurt speed-wise. You can still
  byte-compile this file manually if you believe it helps.


Unfortunately I can't provide a Cygwin package at this time as I don't
have access to a Windoze box currently. If someone wants to jump in,
please let me know.

Comments, bug reports, and praise \\;^) are appreciated as usual.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka <hoe...@co...>
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/