Title: Release Notes for freeWAIS 0.4 Authors: Jim Fullton, Kevin Gamiel, Archie Warnock, and a cast of thousands Copyright: Copyright 1994 CNIDR Last Updated: 1 January 1995 Abstract: This file contains a list of fixes and enhancements for freeWAIS Version 0.4 1. Completely reworked the subdirectory structure to allow easier tracking of development. 2. Rewrote Makefiles to make building and installation easier 3. Incorporated patches from Achim Jung to support Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. 4. Incorporated patches from Wayne Allen to improve performance, handle more documents and reduce size requirements (document weights are now floats instead of longs). 5. Incorporated patches from Jonny Goldman to improve handling of word pairs. 6. Added documentation (README.gopher_and_v0.4) to describe necessary changes to link v0.4 with the gopher distribution from boombox.micro.umn.edu. 7. Incorporated a patch to add a new gopher document type to the indexer. 8. Miscellaneous contributed patches incorporated - keep them coming to freewais@cnidr.org. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Title: Release Notes for freeWAIS 0.3 Authors: Jim Fullton, Kevin Gamiel, Archie Warnock, Lee Brotzman and a cast of thousands Copyright: Copyright 1994 CNIDR Last Updated: 7 March 1994 Abstract: This file contains a list of fixes and enhancements for freeWAIS Version 0.3 1. Incorporated a number of fixes from Ulrich Pfeiffer and Huynh Quoc Thanh Tung to fix bugs in the Boolean and partial word matching code, and to incorporate soundex and phonix matching algorithms. We thank them sincerely for their contribtion to the effort. 2. The server was leaving zombie processes on some machines. Now fixed. 3. Added sample CFLAGS to the top level Makefile from successful builds on various platforms. 4. Ported the code to 386/486 Intel compatibles running Linux and DEC Alphas running OSF/1. 5. Incorporated lots of patches submitted by the user community to freewais@cnidr.org. Thanks, folks, and keep 'em coming. 6. Started the process of cleaning up the warnings the code used to generate (lint and gcc's -Wall option are enormous helps). This release has been tested on the following platforms: DECstation/Ultrix/gcc DECstation/Ultrix/cc SGI/Irix/gcc Sun/SunOS/gcc DEC Alpha/OSF/1/gcc 486/Linux/gcc -------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Release Notes for freeWAIS 0.2 Authors: Jim Fullton, Archie Warnock and a cast of thousands Copyright: Copyright 1993 CNIDR Last Updated: 10.01.93 Abstract: This file contains a list of fixes and enhancements for freeWAIS Version 0.2. General Notice: Copyright notices have been included for the developers who wished CNIDR to do so. CNIDR has also added a compilation copyright to the entire release to protect the work of the network community. See the COPYRIGHT file for more information-it has changed from the 0.1 release. 1. Bug fixes: Lots were contributed by users, and were incorporated into the source code in too many places to enumerate. See the source files themselves, or use RCS. 2. Files renamed: I couldn't stand having main routines hidden in files whose names had no relationship to the programs. So, ir/irbuild.c has been renamed ir/waisindex.c ir/server.c has been renamed ir/waisserver.c ui/screen-ui.c has been renamed ui/swais.c ui/shell-ui.c has been renamed ui/waissearch.c 3. Modified swais so that it uses curses for displaying documents rather piping the documents to a pager. Piping didn't always work correctly on all machines (like my SGI). Also, some additional cursor key support was added in swais, so that right arrow (->) and left arrow (<-) move you through the source list by screens. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Release Notes for freeWAIS 0.1 Authors: Jim Fullton, Kevin Gamiel, Jane Smith, Robin Braun Copyright: Copyright 1993 CNIDR Last Updated: 04.09.93 Abstract: This file contains a list of fixes and enhancements for freeWAIS Version 0.1. General Notice: Copyright notices have been included for the developers who wished CNIDR to do so. CNIDR has also added a compilation copyright to the entire release to protect the work of the network community. See the COPYRIGHT file for more information. Specific enhancements to the waisserver/waisindex: -- 1.Compressed files are now supported by the server. The server will uncompress files prior to indexing then discard the uncompressed files afterwards. Server based retrieval of compressed files has also been added. Jonathon Goldman (jonathon@think.com) of Thinking Machines Corporation -- 2. A new scoring mechanism is introduced for weighting returned items. Documents are now scored based on the log of the query word frequency, the number of occurrences of the word throughout the entire database, and the size of the given document. Simon Spero (ses@sunsite.unc.edu) at UNC-CH -- 3. Synonym support is now included on a site specific level. The server administrator can manually create a file called database_name.syn containing a list in the form: word synonym synonym synonym synonym word synonym synonym synonym synonym word synonym synonym synonym synonym word synonym synonym synonym synonym Any word on a line will match any other word on the same line. Example: heart myocardium myocardial cardiac A document with the word cardiac will be returned as a hit for a query containing the word heart. The synonym list is at the administrator's discretion. Note - when a synonym list is added or changed, the database must be re-indexed. Ahmet Taylor (Ahmet_Taylor@unc.edu) at UNC-CH -- 4. The symbol UNCOMPRESSOR has now been defined so that you can choose which external application is used for decompression. This is located in the futil.c file. Francois Schiettecatte (francois@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu) at the Welch Medical Library Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@athena.mit.edu) of Aktis, Inc. -- 5. A headline cleaner has been added to remove carriage return and line feed characters from the headline. This is located in irtfiles.c and is called cleanHeadline. Francois Schiettecatte (francois@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu) at the Welch Medical Library -- 6. Support for stemming is included in this release. The server stems the query words prior to searching. The stemmer is contained in stem.c and can optionally be replaced. The default stemmer is a Porter stemmer. Francois Schiettecatte (francois@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu) at the Welch Medical Library Jim Fullton (Jim.Fullton@cnidr.org) of the CNIDR -- 7. There is now support for partial word searching and optional stop-list file support. Don Gilbert (gilbert@bio.indiana.edu) at Indiana University (see iubio-wais.readme and iubio-wais.news) -- 8. The ability to perform boolean and literal searches has been added. Tim Gauslin of the USGS (see iubio-wais.readme and iubio-wais.news) -- 9. Support is now in place for extra keywords and extra keyword file indexing. David Post (post@cs.cornell.edu) of the Design Research Institute -- 10. Support has been added for indexing and retrieving multitype documents. Francois Schiettecatte (francois@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu) -- 11. More granularity is now included in the -mem option. -mem will now understand 2 through 5. Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@athena.mit.edu) of Atkis, Inc. -- 12. Various fixes have been added which will allow wais to be built more easily on different platforms. Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@athena.mit.edu) of Atkis, Inc. -- 13. There is now a DUMPCORE compiler option which will force the waisserver to dump core when aborting. Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@athena.mit.edu) of Atkis, Inc. -- 14. The intermediate index files in the indexing process by waisindex are now merged during the process rather than at the end. This is more economical in terms of disk space. The END_MERGE compile option will override this feature and merge the files at the end of the indexing process which is how it used to work. Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@athena.mit.edu) of Atkis, Inc. -- 15. The quality of the source descriptions has been improved by automatically adding the fifty most frequently occurring words in the index to the .src file. AT&T and the Internic Team -- 16. Host and daatabase level server security has been added. Francois Schiettecatte (francois@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu) ============================================================================== Much thanks goes to all of the contributors to this release. Your time and code are an invaluable part of freeWAIS-0.1 . We would like to particularly thank Francois Schiettecatte at Johns Hopkins University for all of his efforts in putting together freeWAIS-0.1. CNIDR looks forward to continued cooperation and work with all of you in the future. If you or your site is interested in becoming an official beta tester for CNIDR for future releases, please send your name and email address to freeWAIS@cnidr.org. This will help us to have a more organized distribution and test audience in the future. Thanks. .