[Xapian-discuss] Xapian 0.8.4 released

[Olly Betts]

I've uploaded Xapian 0.8.4:

http://www.xapian.org/download.php

There are three important changes.  The first is a change to the
preferred way of opening a database - the existing way will still work;
the second and third are incompatible changes to features we believe
aren't widely used.  The second should be caught at compile time, but
the third won't:

* Added constructors to Database and WritableDatabase which fulfil the role
  that the Auto::open() factory functions currently do.  Auto::open() is
  now deprecated.

* Removed the ability to write a Xapian object to an ostream directly, as
  it's little used and potentially dangerous ('cout << mset[i];' will
  compile, but you almost certainly meant 'cout << *mset[i];').  You can
  get the old effect by writing 'cout << obj->get_description();' instead
  of 'cout << obj;'.  Note that including xapian.h no longer pulls in
  fstream, which code may have been implicitly relying on - if this is
  a problem add '#include <fstream>' after '#include <xapian.h>'.

* Renamed BM25 parameters to match standard naming in papers and elsewhere
  (A->k3, B->k1, C->k2, D->b), eliminated the extra factor of 2 which our C
  had, and reordered the parameters to k1, k2, k3.  This is an incompatible API
  change for BM25Weight(), so if you are using custom parameters for BM25
  you'll need to update your code.

A few other highlights:

This release fixes a few bugs, and improves portability.  There have
also been a number of code cleanups.

Omega now includes hooks for indexing several additional file formats:
OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, and RTF.

Full details of the changes can be found using the links next to each
component on the download page.

Enjoy!

Cheers,
    Olly