pYsearch

This is a question for anyone using pYsearch (I hope there is some usage?), and/or users of Y! BOSS: Should we include BOSS in pYsearch? Please comment here, or email me with your thoughts.

Enough said, yet another service is gone from the search APIs, and therefore pYsearch. I'm removing all support for Video Search in the upcoming release.

I've just begun working on another round of API cleanups, to assure the pYsearch code is completely on parity with the search APIs. If you have any problems, bugs or ideas, now would be a good time to file a bug or contact me.

I've migrated the CVS source tree to the Subversion SCM. This is hopefully not causing any trouble, but please let me know if you have any problems.

I've been told the Audio search APIs from Y! search are discontinued. The next release of pYsearch will therefore remove support for these APIs. This was in response to our "bug" about audio search returning invalid XML responses, so I'll go ahead and close that SF bug as well.

We're back! (well, kind of ...)

As you might have noticed, the site has been down (or having issues) today. This was due to changes made on the Sourceforge site, where they've upgraded a lot of servers and software. I managed to get the old site back up again, but since I was fiddling with so much anyways, I decided it was time to push the new site.

So, here it is, probably still a bit shaky, so I'd like to apologize for any inconvenience in advance. If you experience any problems, definitely let us know (file a bug on the Bugs tracker please). I am aware that the mySQL servers at SourceForge are pretty unstable, and every now and then I get an error that we can't contact the DB servers. I'm hoping this will be resolved soon, but there's nothing I can do about it...

Update: I finally figured out the problem with the blank pages (Error 500), turns out to be a missing PHP file... And the DBs seems to be having a better day, maybe because it's a Saturday.

Cheers,

-- leif

I've placed a number of distro packages (RPM's, .deb's etc) on the http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=134651. Currently available are

• Fedora Core 8
• Fedora Core 9
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4)
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5)
• Ubuntu8 (which might work on other debian type systems)
• OpenSolaris

After you download, verify that the MD5 checksum (md5sum) is correct (and please report any inconsistencies immediately):

Package name                            md5sum
============                            ================================
pYsearch-3.1-1.fc8.noarch.rpm           eb60ec8bcfb544dd9bcee916a7346ce5
pYsearch-3.1-1.fc9.noarch.rpm           1631cf13ecc47a2c04ce58d4a9181d83
pYsearch-3.1-1.rhel4.noarch.rpm         6b49ba9095f7ed81ae61763c058ca754
pYsearch-3.1-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm         e8a0e54035692121c3de3c1c0e44277e
pYsearch-3.1-1.ubuntu8_all.deb          4e01929f9a92742d304bb5eb3d3e63a6
pYsearch.3.1.opensolaris.pkg.tgz        85c3bfbbe628f9c8519fef6c4dbf6542

I've got a few reports on issues with pYsearch, and there are currently two known issues, both which are because of the search APIs.

• Some search responses, particularly from Spelling Suggestions, can include "raw" ampersand characters (&). This is not valid XML (the ampersand should be using a character entity representation), so our DOM parser croaks. I've had a bug outstanding with Y! search on this for a long time now.
• The Audio search regresion test fails, because some searches can return a "length" of 0.0 seconds, when the documentation clearly says it'll always return an integer. I have a bug outstanding on this as well.

As it turns out, our unit tests have found several problems with the APIs in the past, and it continues to do so. However, I hope to make the test suite even more complete, if anyone wish to contribute here, that'd be great.

To minimize the noise in comments, I've made comments require my approval before they get posted. I'll try to update / approve comments at least once a day. For bug reports etc., please use the SourceForge link above.

pYsearch v3.1 is just released, and now available for download. This is a tiny update, to fix a problem with the old AppID parsing logic (it's now disabled, and not enforced). At the same time, we decided to remove the support for My Web searches, since they are no longer available.

Enjoy!

-- Leif

From the release notes:

[09/11/07] pYsearch v3.1

• Removed checks for appID format.
• Removed all MyWeb v1 and v2 features.