Initially I was going to call this entry “maintenance release”, because most of the recent work focused on bugfixing. And bugfixing will continue. We're already stable in core functionality, and deployed in production – but the ultimate goal is to produce rock-solid 0.9.8-release, totally free of major bugs (and then patch it if any issues are uncovered later).

There also was a number of new minor features developed, though, so it's technically not just all about the maintenance. Changes since previous snapshot are as follows:

• added automated tests;
• added RPM spec file;
• added mysql_connect_flags option to MySQL data source;
• added weight_order, use_boundaries, exact_phrase, single_passage options to BuildExcerpts() API call;
• added phrase_boundary, phrase_boundary_step options to indexes;
• rewritten synonyms code (much faster, and suported in SBCS tokenizers now);
• and, of course, numerous bugfixes.

One important fix-related change which should be mentioned is float attributes support in the APIs. In searchd network protocol, byte order for floats had been changed from machine dependent to network order. This means that Java API works OK with floats now, but older snapshots of 0.9.8 PHP API must be upgraded for floats to work correctly. Only floats (including @geodist) are affected; so if you're not using them yet, you could safely ignore this.

Current revision is r985. Source tarball and Win32 binaries are, as usual, available from Downloads.