This place is also going to hold intra-release news on Sphinx development; a kind of a blog. To start, let's tease everyone with the upcoming 0.9.6 release. It's feature list might not be that big, but there was a lot of behind the scenes work since 0.9.5.

searchd network protocol was rewritten from scratch. It is now binary, and designed to be extensible and backwards compatibile. Intended to be helpful for those who run a lot of sites on one Sphinx, because updating Sphinx should no longer be an immediate requirement to update sphinxapi.php on each site.

0.9.6 also adds distributed searching capabilities (which entailed the network protocol rewrite). searchd can now not only search local indexes but query remote agents as well, properly merging all the results. It can actually query itself too, which means that this feature can be used both for making a search cluster with 2+ different machines and parallelizing search on 1 multi-CPU box.

There's also an ongoing work on document excerpt generation (with, of course, search terms highlighting) which I want to be completed in 0.9.6. It's implemented as an additional feature in searchd accessible through sphinxapi.

As for the bugfixes, the most noticeable fix is for that annoying bug in the config parser, which replicated the last value if the value was empty. Example config was also fixed, so the provided example should be working smoothly out of the box.