Greetings all, I will be working on a clean up release of SenseClusters - mainly taking care of small glitches in documentation, organization, testing, and installation procedures. I don't plan on adding any new functionality for this version, more or less just cleaning up a few lose ends.
If there are issues of that sort that you've noticed, this would be a great time to mention them, as it will be very easy to take care of them now. If there is larger functionality changes that you are interested in, please don't hesitate to mention those as I might get ambitious, and there will be another release coming along after this. I am considering using CPAN as a distribution site in addition to sourceforge, and actually have uploaded SenseClusters there now - it would be called Text::SenseClusters at CPAN, just because they frown on introducing new high level names there, and it helps describe it for new users somewhat. The reason I'm thinking of using CPAN is to further automate the installation procedure - some time agree I created a Bundle for SenseClusters (Bundle::SenseClusters, although I might rename as Bundle::Text:: SenseClusters) that if you install using the CPAN.pm module will check for an load all the prerequisite CPAN packages, by simply doing this... cpan > install Bundle::SenseClusters I think we can include SenseClusters in the Bundle, or have it call the Bundle, and reduce the Perl installation part of SenseClusters to a single command. Right now it's actually surprisingly easy, but I'd like it to be easier still. I'm also contemplating including a pre-edited version of SVDPACKC with the package, since new releases of that are very very unlikely, and it appears to be permissible under the terms of the license that it is distributed. That would just leave cluto as an external install, which isn't too bad since that comes as a binary. The other thing I like about CPAN is that it makes the code and documentation much more "visible". You can browse around the source code and documentation and really see it, and that seems like it will lead to easier maintenance. This might also make it possible to reduce certain directories that would become redundant, like our HTML tree (which would be created and available, in effect, via CPAN). It's important to stress that we would still use sourceforge for distribution and CVS, so a possible CPAN release is in addition to what we normally do, not instead of. Finally, this is the route that we took with NSP, and over time we ended up with a package that is much more object oriented, and I think that evolution was in some sense encouraged by being on CPAN. The good news is that none of this is that essential, it's just nice to do. I downloaded SenseClusters on a new machine today, and was actually quite impressed at how easy it was to install and get running, and the demo scripts and test scripts that we make available with it remain extensive and more complete/thorough than we probably have for any other package. So, it remains a great example of how to put together a really complicated system and make it easy to use, and the above are all just tiny tweaks on what is an extremely solid body of work. So, suggestions would be particularly helpful now, and if you are interested in seeing SenseClusters on CPAN you can see an experimental release there now : http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-SenseClusters/ This is version 0.96, where the even number implies development version, so 0.95 remains our stable release, and what you should use if you are interested in doing experiments, etc. with the package. I'll continue to use the even numbers for development releases like this, hopefully culminating in a 1.01 stable release. SenseClusters really deserves to be > 1 as well. Thanks! Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ senseclusters-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/senseclusters-users
