[Refdb-users] ANN: refdb-0.9.4-pre3 available for testing

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Hi all,

I'm sure most of you have better things to do at this time of the
year, but there's a new prerelease of RefDB available for testing. It
is about time to release 0.9.4 and this is supposed to be the last
prerelease before the rollout. The prerelease is available right here:

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

See the NEWS file for the full details about what has changed compared
to previous versions. The main issues are:

- You'll have to recreate the system database and the reference
  database as the schemas have changed compared to 0.9.3 and compared
  to 0.9.4-pre2. See the file UPGRADING if you want to keep your
  existing data.

- RefDB now supports extended notes. These notes can be freely linked
  to any number of references, author names, keywords, and periodical
  names. A couple of new commands (addnote/updatenote, getnote,
  deletenote, addlink) are available in refdbc to manage these
  notes. The query language was slightly modified to allow searching
  for references which are linked to particular notes and vice
  versa. See the documentation for 0.9.4 which is already available at
  http://refdb.sourceforge.net/doc.html

- Updating the personal information may lead to loss of data in the
  previous 0.9.4 prereleases (0.9.3 and earlier were not
  affected). This is a *very good* reason to upgrade if you run a
  0.9.4 prerelease currently.


There's one thing you should look out for when testing this
prerelease:

- strictly speaking, RefDB requires the current CVS versions of both
  libdbi and libdbi-drivers due to bugfixes in the datetime parsing
  (libdbi) and the added support for DATE and TIME types
  (libdbi-drivers, pgsql driver only; the other drivers used to
  support this already). There was a small change in the API unrelated
  to these fixes, but this might cause problems if you build RefDB
  with the latest official libdbi release. I believe I've worked
  around this but I couldn't verify this myself. If you do use the
  latest releases and run pgsql, please expect some hiccups that I
  want to know about.

I'd also like to point out that Michael Smith started to develop a new
Emacs minor mode as a graphical front-end for RefDB. It works just
fine in conjunction with ris.el. refdb-mode.el has not
been released officially but it is available from CVS in the elisp
directory. It is not yet feature-complete but it is improving
rapidly. Please give it a try and provide feedback for Mike. All
existing documentation is at the top of refdb-mode.el.

regards,
Markus

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