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NewsNov 17, 2008. 0.9.9-rc1 is outAll the new features just have been finally documented, all the internal tests pass, so here goes another major step towards version 1.0 (or maybe 1.10 right away? or even 3.23?). Meet a beta version of Sphinx 0.9.9, introducing 34 new features; a handful of improvements and fixes worth a mention in the changelog; and numerous minor changes I did not count. Choosing top-10 features to highlight here was actually a tough job. (Even though choosing top-3 was a no-brainer.) Here they go.
Normally this major changeset would be declared an alpha. However, thanks to brave testers, 0.9.9 already runs in production on several sites. And also its test coverage is actually even better than that of 0.9.8. So we can light-heartedly call it beta (as in "no known major bugs"). Bundled website update includes a few extra links, of which I personally would claim C# .NET API port and Ubuntu package (in Contributed software section) most interesting. And, as you see, we've also refit News and Docs sections; you now can (anonymously) comment on the posts and submit 'em to places like Digg. Testing time! View 7 comment(s) // Add comment // del.icio.us // digg // stumbleOct 30, 2008. 0.9.8.1-release is outToday's Downloads star is Sphinx 0.9.8.1. This is a bugfix release, and every commit received especially careful review, so upgrades from 0.9.8 should be smooth. Most of the issues were actually pretty subtle and only occurred under (combinations of) special, and rather rare, circumstances. Except for the index merge feature, where several major bugs were reported in about a month since 0.9.8 release (and then it took another month to get them all caught, reproduced, and fixed). The complete change log is available in the documentation. Speaking of months, we've been silent (on the website) for a while. Not really intentionally, rather just because a whole lot of things happened in the meantime, making me uber-busy, and thus postponing the release rollout somewhat past the point when it was due. For one, October was especially busy; in late September the update rollout was scheduled for October, 1st, but.. you see the calendar. I'd rant about all the events leading to this much of a deadline slip if they were not that numerous. On the brighter side, the update includes more fixes this way. And speaking of events, here goes a new section called Presentations. For now, it only carries our own talks; but please submit yours too! I've just added new slides from 2 conferences held this fall in Russia that I talked at. Going to translate the slides to English as time permits. Some slides back from 2007 are also there (marked as new based on the time of addition, not the talk). Community contributors also did a bunch of work in the meantime, resulting in a couple of new localized articles (in Italian and Turkish), and more contributed software - namely, a patch that adds Firebird support, Drupal modules, Haskell API port, and PECL API port. Of these, I'd especially like to highlight PECL API port. It's based on libsphinxclient (bundled with Sphinx), works as a drop-in replacement to the reference PHP API, and is naturally faster (though we've yet to see the benchmarks). Cheers to Tony, Pierre, Johannes, Markus, Chris, Eelco, Ludovico, and Salih! Last but not least, likely the final teaser for 0.9.9. It adds a number of shiny new features, it now runs in production on several sites, and the only thing that currently holds the alpha release from going public is actually simply the lack of documentation on those features. Ah, and it is where the most changes went, which is one of the reasons why the change log for 0.9.8.1 is so small. View 0 comment(s) // Add comment // del.icio.us // digg // stumbleJul 15, 2008. 0.9.8-release is outI have been frequently put to shame for Sphinx release schedule and version numbering. Indeed, taking into the account the typical amount of features and fixes per snapshot, most if not all of so-called snapshots in 0.9.8 branch could likely qualify for a separate release, receive their very own minor version tags, etc. We are going to work on that. But even the longest journey begins with a first step. Time to make that step. Over 15 months, over 700 revisions, and about 70 new features since the previous "release" tag, Sphinx 0.9.8-release is finally out. As usual, source tarball and Win32 binaries are available in the Downloads section. The complete list of new features since 0.9.7 is available in the documentation. With 70 entries, it's too big to copy here, and had to be split in several sections for the doc. It does not include bugfixes at all, cause that would make it too big even for the doc. (Also, I'm too lazy to go through all the commits and summarize all the fixes we did over the year). The complete changelog since RC2 is also in the documentation. (This one includes the fixes.) There were no new features in the engine itself since 0.9.8-rc2, because we intentionally froze it. Nevertheless, we did some additions to the whole package:
Some trivia about 0.9.8-release:
Also in the news, we're among the finalists in SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2008! Sphinx is in the shortlists for “Best Project”, “Best Project for the Enterprise”, and, somewhat unexpectedly for me, “Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition”. Many thanks to all who voted for Sphinx during the nominations! Now is the time to vote again in the 2nd round. There are several quite popular competitors (such as OpenOffice), so please spread the word as much as you can. 
As promised, the next update is going to be 0.9.9 alpha. We've already got some nice new features there for you, but need to merge all the fixes from 0.9.8 and eliminate some known crashes. In the meantime, have fun with 0.9.8, be sure to report everything that resembles a bug, and vote for Sphinx again. Thanks! View 0 comment(s) // Add comment // del.icio.us // digg // stumbleJun 06, 2008. PHPconf '2008 talk slides; SF CCA '2008 call-for-votersThe final release of 0.9.8 and an alpha of 0.9.9 are still in progress, but there's a number of small things that yearn to be published already. Hence this website only update. First, here go the Sphinx talk slides from PHPconf 2008, both the original Russian version (PPT, 460 KB), and English version (PPT, 458 KB) (alas, the translation will probably miss some jokes). The event was recorded, and it was told that the talk videos (also in Russian) will be available at some point, but at the moment they are not. Second, Arnold D. just pointed me to SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2008. You can nominate Sphinx in several different categories; I think that “Best Project”, “Best Project for the Enterprise”, and “Best New Project” do possibly apply. (Not that I'd violently reject $1B acquisition offer, of course.. but it also mentions 'likely' so let's try to stay realistic here.) The nominations will close in mid-June, so please hurry. Finally, there are several new articles on Sphinx, and also a few more web sites who decided to acknowledge that they're Sphinx-powered. “Powered by” list is already getting hard to scroll but is still slightly under 100-site lets-redesign-it internal threshold; so you're especially encouraged to submit yours. View 0 comment(s) // Add comment // del.icio.us // digg // stumbleMay 16, 2008. MySQL UC talk; PHPconf talk; and dev plansThe slides from the Sphinx talk that I gave a month ago at MySQL UC 2008 had already been available from O'Reilly for some time. However, I've just wrapped up the slides with the talk itself. The resulting article combines both basic overview and some of the advanced stuff on the searching internals; so I hope it should be an interesting read for everybody. Here's the article in Word format (131 KB) and PDF format (202 KB), and for completeness, here are the slides in PPT format (638 KB) (they are embedded in the article). I'll also be giving a talk on Sphinx at PHPconf 2008 Russia in Moscow (on May 30th), so if you're speaking Russian and interested in Sphinx, catch me there. Most of the April was spent conferencing so there's been less work on Sphinx than usual (and no updates on the site at all). However we had written some code in the meantime anyway, mostly in 0.9.9 branch. There were a few fixes in 0.9.8 since RC2 but not really much; so I am planning to finish the fixing and roll out 0.9.8-release out within a couple of weeks. Alpha version of 0.9.9 will be made available in a few days after that. View 0 comment(s) // Add comment // del.icio.us // digg // stumbleArchive |
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