There was a lot of testing going on in the last 2 months, and I forgot all about writing blog entries.

The first stage of testing was to go through the Greenstone tutorials on Windows (Vista), Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac (Leopard). Some bugs were discovered and fixed, and after that RC1 of GS2.85 could be released.

Thereafter, further tests were conducted on all three OS: testing out combinations of the 3 indexers and 3 database types, processing of a range of file types including the use of Greenstone’s PDFBox and OpenOffice extensions, filenames with different encodings and HTML files that interlink with each other using different encodings, the remote Greenstone server and the GLI applet were tested out, as well as spaces in the filepath for Windows. This time, the tests were conducted on Windows XP, Linux CentOS as well as Mac Leopard again. A lot of bugs had still got through the net after the first stage of testing, but were caught this time around and fixed for the release of GS2.85 RC2.

Greenstone 2.85 RC2 was finally released on Wednesday 26 October 2011. The Greenstone Team invites all those interested to please test the new release binaries out, which can be obtained from http://www.greenstone.org/snapshots, and write back on any bugs or issues encountered. The updated release notes are at http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/2.85_Release_Notes

The release notes already contain instructions on a patch for a minor issue that Diego discovered in the earlier release and which had persisted into the current one.

It’s been about 4 weeks since I wrote an entry. In the meantime we’ve been tidying up the last of the To Do list items for the upcoming GS2 release and several of the To Do list items for the GS3 release. Sam is now hard working on the GS3 interface alongside his other work on the Document Maker. It now looks like GS3 may be released separately, after GS2.

Some of the more involved things that required doing were:

• testing OAI (dc.Resource Identifier issues) and downloading over OAI
• The extracted embedded metadata, ex.*.metadata (e.g. ex.dc.* prefixes), needed to be handled different from ex.metadata. This required some changes in various files and a lot of testing.
• Conflicts between EmbeddedMetadataPlugin and some of the existing Plugins in the pipeline (OAI, DSpace, PDF plugins). Fortunately, Dr Bainbridge came up with fixes. After some testing, the known problems with these plugins no longer exist. With the tutorials we will continue to investigate how well other plugins interact with the EmbeddedMetaPlugin.
• The OAI validator at openarchives now had a test where GS2’s OAI server failed and a different one where the GS3 OAI server failed. These have been fixed up.
• The GS3 installer needed to have an admin page, like the GS2 installer does, where the user can enable admin pages and provide a password.
• wvware.pl is a new intermediary script to launch wvware in its own particular environment. This script is necessary in order for wvware’s required environment not to be set globally (thereby tampering with Linux’ windowing/GUI libraries)
• At the moment, after John Rose’s request, we’re in the process of merging the two server configuration files (glisite.cfg and llssite.cfg), so we can have just one, with some properties qualified by a “gli” prefix. The Server.jar code, the GS2 C++ code, the startup scripts and config files have been sufficiently modified to work with the work-in-progress on the GLI code, while still working with the stable GLI. Changing the GLI code was tricky two years ago, and made the code’s behaviour rather  complex. Now that I’m in the process of testing the latest overhaul to it, the changes I’ve just made to what was stable are still very buggy and reproducing the bugs takes some time. Fortunately, without the changes to the GLI code, everything else committed is able to work as accurately as before, which is fortunate since if I break anything, it will be just the LocalLibraryServer.java GLI code that once committed needs to be reverted.
• The above task has now been completely resolved, and changes committed after being tested thoroughly on both Windows and Linux.

Minor issues also kept popping up over the last month.

• There was a Z3950 “issue”that sidetracked me and which turned out not to be an issue after all: The Library of Congress’ Z3950 address seems to return SRU data. The fix is simply for the user to use the right module of the download pane.
• A bug in starting and stopping GS3 via GLI on windows
• One Greenstone member encountered a unicode issue that I wasn’t able to reproduce after initial investigations.
• Minor but frustrating bugs with the GLI for GS3 have been resolved (an extra nested <format/> tag appearing when all format statements have been removed, and the preview button activating itself when editing format statements in an unbuilt GS3 collection)
• Fixed GS3’s way of handling the port in the GSI application, so that it is no longer arbitrarily modified. The Do Not Modify port is still available.
• Some requests on the mailing list like porting indexed databases from one GS2 version to the next, since changes had been made to the name of an ex.metadata

After last week’s bug discovery got fixed at the start of this week (there were issues with HTML files that had non-English filenames interlinking on a Mac OS), we went back to testing the Greenstone binaries on Windows, Linux and Mac. Finally, after uploading all the files onto SourceForge and adjusting the pages there as well as updating Greenstone.org’s own download page, we succeeded in releasing Greenstone 2.84 today!

To grab the Greenstone 2.84 binary for your operating system, visit the download page at Greenstone.org. This page also has the source distributions available in zip and tar.gz formats. Otherwise, you can always expand your binary installation with source code by grabbing the “source-component” archive files from the same download page.

The Greenstone 2.84 Release Notes contain installation instructions as well as details on how to use the latest Greenstone extensions like the PDFBox extension (for later versions of PDF) and OpenOfficeConverter (which can handle the latest Office docx format).

After a lot more testing, discovering bugs, fixing bugs and further testing, we’ve finally generated our 2nd release candidate for Greenstone 2.84. This time, there’s also a binary for the MacOS (tested on Leopard).

Most of the bugs this time round (after Release Candidate 1) had to do with dynamically linked libraries on the MacOs, getting the new document plugins from Greenstone Extensions to work when the Greenstone server is on a remote machine, Imagemagick processing JPEG2000 images on Linux machines, and fixing some issues around installing Greenstone on Windows in a path containing spaces.

Things seem to look good so far (but we’d appreciate independent confirmation of it), so if you haven’t already, do grab a copy and try it out. And tell us about your discoveries: any difficulties, bugs or other insights, so that we can make the final release of Greenstone 2.84 perfect.

Greentone 2.84 has cool new features, including the long-awaited ability to process docx and other new Office formats, as well as recent versions of PDF documents. These features are available as extensions to Greenstone, for which the details can be found in the Release Notes.

Download the Greenstone 2.84 RC2 from the Snapshots page.

The Greenstone wiki page 2.84 Release Notes has information on installation, running, where to get the new Greenstone extensions and more.

We are pleased to announce that the Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.81 are now available for download from:

http://www.greenstone.org/download

The main focus has been on multilingual support. Improvements include handling filenames that include non-ASCII characters, accent folding switched on by default for Lucene, and character based segmentation for CJK languages.

This release also features our new installer, which is 100% open source. Previously we had relied on a commercial program for this, which incurred a significant cost in keeping up to date; consequently we decided to develop our own installer, based on the excellent open source installer toolkits already available.

There are many other significant additions in this release, such as the Fedora Librarian Interface (analogous to GLI, but working with a Fedora repository). See the release notes for the complete details. Specific issues fixed in the 2.81 release can be viewed in Greenstone Trac here and here.

This has been a long time coming, thank you for your patience.

As always, please report any problems or bugs to the mailing list.

————–

Thanks to:

John Rose, for help with English GLI help, French translations for GLI and Greenstone.
Maxime Rouast for Greenstone French translations
Celine Guimbertaud for GLI French translations
Yohannes Mulugeta and Abiyot Bayou for Greenstone Amharic translations
Kamal Salih for GLI Arabic translations
Gerhard Riesthuis for Greenstone Dutch translations
Mohan Raj Pradhan for GLI Nepali translations.
Diego Spano for translating the installer’s interface into Spanish.
Xiaofeng Yu for translating the installer’s interface into Mandarin.
Doris Jung for translating the installer’s interface into German.

Starting now, nightly “snapshot” releases of Greenstone3 will be constructed and made available on our snapshots page.

Every night, the most recent revision of the Greenstone3 source code will be automatically checked out, compiled, and packaged up as an easy-to-use installer and put up on our website. These snapshots will be created for Linux and Windows, and soon, Mac. They will be made available in two formats: as an executable Jar, or as a native binary for your operating system. And to make things even easier, there is also a native binary which comes bundled with Java.

As of today, you no longer have to wait for a release to come out before you can take advantage of a new feature of Greenstone3. All you have to do is install the latest snapshot release, and you will have all the features added up to the previous day.

Nightly snapshot releases were made possible by our move to the open source installer Ant Installer. We have been able to construct a release “kit” for each operating system, which automatically creates releases of Greenstone3 using a number of Ant scripts, the Ant Installer software, and a simple executable wrapper program. Since creating a release is now as easy as running a single command, we decided to let the computer create them nightly.

Not surprisingly, the snapshot releases are likely to have a few flaws. These flaws will have two sources: bugs in the release kits, and bugs in the Greenstone code. As far as the release kits are concerned, in time we aim to eliminate all the bugs, so that they produce robust and usable installers. But as for the Greenstone code, we recognise that the most recent revision of the Greenstone code will always have some “bleeding edges”, so we do not expect to ever eliminate all the bugs there. (If you want thoroughly tested releases, go for one of our regular releases, not a snapshot.)

You can help us to perfect the Greenstone3 release kits by downloading and installing a snapshot release, and telling us if you hit any problems. Go on, be brave!

(For those interested, instructions for getting and using the release kits themselves are available at http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseKits.)

Also, keep a look out for Greenstone2 snapshot releases and release kits, which are coming soon.

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.80
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone or via our download page.

There is a patch to the 2.80 release, which is a newer version of the main.cfg file with additional configuration for several new languages: malayalam, marathi, tamil, telugu, bulgarian, and sinhalese. To install the patch, download the new main.cfg by right clicking this link and select “save link as” (or “save target as”). Then replace the old main.cfg, which is in the ‘etc’ folder of your Greenstone installation.

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.75
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone or via our download page

Notable Changes

– Language updates to various components:
(Language – Moderator Name)
Russian – Vyacheslav Bakharev
Arabic – Usama Salama, Salih Mustafa
Simplified Chinese – Yan Han
Spanish – Jesus Tramullas
Romanian – Constantinescu Nicolaie
Marathi – Shubhada Nagarkar

– Bug Fixes for Windows Vista
Check for writablity of GSDLHOME before starting GSDL and GLI
Use windows Temp directory for temp files to prevent ‘Access Denied’ errors

We aim to have full Vista compatibility by the next release

– Some new artwork for GLI

We want to ensure that Greenstone works well for you. Please report any
problems to one of the Greenstone mailing lists.

Greenstone3 v3.03 has been released for Windows, GNU/Linux and in Source form (it runs on the Mac no problem; just recompile from source). This release finally contains all the features in Greenstone2, including OAI-PMH and Remote Building support (which are new to this version). It is now very easy to install — just as easy as Greenstone2! This release has been extensively tested.

The principal difference between Greenstone2 and Greenstone3 is the format language. Greenstone3 supports more sophisticated XSLT format statements. Right now they are more complex to use, but developments in the pipeline will make it far easier than Greenstone2 in future. (The only other differences are that Greenstone3 still lacks collaging, and collection/document-level authentication.)

There is one known issue. We forgot to ensure that collections built with Greenstone2 are automatically converted when loaded into GLI under Greenstone3. We will add this facility, but for now a manual conversion program is available here; instructions for its use appear in Greenstone3 for Greenstone2 Users.

Greenstone2 will continue to be supported for a long time yet (years), but ultimately we see Greenstone3 replacing it. See the Greenstone3 home page and the Wiki for more details.

Greenstone v2.73 released! An unstable release containing new features and bug fixes. See the release notes for more information.