My Intel Mac Mini returned from being repaired today, and so I was able to produce Intel Mac binaries. Get them while they’re hot.
http://emdros.org/download.html
Enjoy!
Ulrik
It’s official. The Emdros 1.2.0.pre222 has seen the light of day (or dark of night, depending on where you are on the globe).
As usual, you can get it while it’s hot via:
http://emdros.org/download.html
This release sees, among other things, some bugfixes (especially one on MySQL), and also improvements to the importers — even a new importer for SIL’s SFM (Standard Format Marker) format.
Enjoy!
Ulrik
Today I worked on the build process for Mac OS X. It turned out quite a few items were missing from the .dmg images I distribute as Mac releases; in particular, all libraries were missing, as were a few binaries, including the test programs. The Programmer’s Reference Guide and the Emdros Query Tool User’s Guide were also missing.
Well, no more. The next release will have all the missing parts.
I also discovered that I had made a boo-boo in the last release (1.2.0.pre218). A bug, actually. In particular, the build would sometimes fail, and — worse — the text type on MySQL is now “TEXT” rather than “LONGBLOB”.
Needless to say, this bug has been fixed. A release should not be far off…
Today I checked off one more of the “STOP SHIP” items on my TODO list for the upcoming “2.0″ release, thus inching closer to being able to end the 1.2.0.pre-series.
Nothing fancy; just the tedious changing of assert(X) to ASSERT_THROW(X, “give the reason here”).
You’ll find the definition of ASSERT_THROW in debug.h in the Emdros Sourcecode.
Standard Format Markers (SFMs) is a way of marking up text that has been used within the organisation “SIL International” for about three decades. SFMs are used as the basis for the format of the ToolBox and ShoeBox programs, and thus quite a bit of the world’s linguistic data is stored in SFM.
Today I completed writing a “generic” SFM importer for Emdros. The importer doesn’t deal with all of the data encoded in SFM; it only deals with “one word per record” SFM files, not the “several words per record” SFM files that can also be produced by ToolBox and ShoeBox.
This will make its public debut in the next release after 1.2.0.pre221.
Emdros is developed in two parallel source trees: A 1.1 series, and a 1.2.0.preXYZ series. The 1.1 series was started in 2001, and has enjoyed at least 22 releases. The current version is 1.1.22, which was released on February 8, 2005. That’s more than a year and a half ago as of this writing. The 1.2.0.preXYZ series was branched off around 1.1.12, which was released on July 7, 2003. The 1.2.0.preXYZ series was intended as a “preview” series of “what was to come”. Little did I know that I would be developing these “previews” for more than three years, and that I would produce as many as 217 previews, not all of which were made public. The awful truth is, I should have released 1.2.0 long ago, but I’ve kept pushing it off into the future because “I just wanted that feature to go in, or I would like to have just that bug squashed, or I would love to see that architectural blemish removed”. It’s a bit like writing a PhD thesis: You want to polish it and make sure that all cracks are tightened, and that it looks good, and that every reference is completely and properly cited, and — oh, by the way — those footnotes had better be copious enough, and did I really check that reference carefully enough? At some point, you just have to let go of your baby. I hope I’ll be a responsible enough “parent” that I do that soon with the 1.2.0.preXYZ series. It probably will not be released as version 1.2.0, since so much development has gone into it that it’s going to be more like version 2.0.
The other awful truth is, the 1.1 series is old, lackluster in performance and features, and will be put on hold shortly. Today I fixed two outstanding bugs in it, and did some release-engineering, making sure it compiles on recent Linuxes and on Solaris 10. I still need to do the release engineering on Win32, but once that is done, you can expect 1.1.23 to be out faster than you can say “Take me to the download page.” Unfortunately, this will also be the last release in the 1.1 series, unless someone finds serious security vulnerabilities in it, report them to me, and tell me that the 1.1 series is important to them, in which case I will consider fixing the vulnerability. But the 1.1 series is dead as far as development is concerned, has long been dead, and — truth be told — I wish nobody used it.
Please drop me a line if you use Emdros. It’s always nice to hear from users.
Ulrik
ulrikp|write-the-sign|emdrosparis|do-t|org
(Remove the French city, by the way.)
Emdros has been packaged by the Russian ALT Linux company. Thanks to Alexey Tourbin and Kirill Maslinsky.
Package link: http://www.altlinux.com/index.php?module=sisyphus&package=emdros