Thursday 29 January 2009

Pinot 0.90

To celebrate the start of the year of the Ox, I am releasing Pinot 0.90 !

Since the release of 0.89 in September, a lot of changes have been made on several fronts :
- Unicode text.
Charset conversion errors are better handled, tokenizing was improved and leads to far less "rubbish" terms. Issues the UI had with non-Latin locales were resolved
- Portability.
The code base builds with MingW and hopefully without too many problems with GCC 4.4.
- Web metasearch.
Plugins were updated, extracts and results URLs are more accurate.
- more coherent UI.
Some features were previously only available in search mode, others in browse mode; some were duplicated. The new menu layout tries to unify both modes. The status window' refresh is smoother. Preferences can be open separately from the UI. Spelling suggestions are less invasive, they pop up in the same tabs as queries results.
- improved More Like This.
Stored queries generated on More Like This don't include the original query's terms, stopwords, infrequent terms or similar terms if the stemming language is set.
- command-line and desktop integration.
pinot-cd.sh implements a "tagged cd", and lets one change the shell's current directory to the directory that matches the path elements passed as parameter. The Deskbar module shows snippets when used with Deskbar 2.24.
- more flexible daemon.
The daemon is smarter at crawling symlinks, it skips those that refer to locations that have been crawled or that it knows will be crawled. It is much better at resuming where it stopped after user interruption. While user-set meta-data would previously be lost on a reindex, or when the file changed on the disk, it's now preserved.

With all these out of the way, I will be able to return to a monthly release cycle where each release brings incremental improvements and bug fixes and bring the project to its 1.0 release.

I would like to thank Adrian Bunk, Adel Gadllah, Martin Michlmayr, C. Scott Ananian and especially John Werden for their contributions to this release in the form of patches, ideas, suggestions and testing. As always the NEWS file has the details. Head to the download page to get the source.