OCaml Weekly News

Think interactive grep for text files, PDFs, DOCXs, etc, but word/token based instead of regex and line based, so you can search across lines easily.

Docfd aims to provide good UX via integration with common text editors and PDF viewers, so you can jump directly to a search result with a single key press.

If you have used Recoll or other local document search engines before, then you can roughly think of this as Recoll-lite with TUI.

The last version announced here was 3.0.0. Docfd has since then undergone many improvements.

Major changes:

• Asynchronous UI
  • You can type and interact with UI without any blocking even if search is slow, and active search will be cancelled when appropriate
• Scripting functionality in the form of a commands file
  • One-to-one correspondence to most UI interactions, allowing you to interact as normal, and save your interaction into a file to repeat the search steps later via `–commands-from`
• Swapped to using SQLite as index DB format, which lowers the memory footprint significantly
  • For the sample of 1.4GB of PDFs used, earlier versions use around 1.9GB of memory to store the index in-memory, while versions since 9.0.0 use only 39MB of memory
• Document indexing was reworked into a multistage pipeline to allow I/O tasks and computational tasks to run concurrently, which makes indexing a few times faster than older versions usually
• Searching was also reworked into a pipeline for better work distribution across domains, improving search speed by 30% in the sample set of PDFs
• Added --open-with to allow customising the command used to open a file based on file extension

• :dragon_face: opam switch create [name] <version> will not include compiler packages flagged with avoid-version~/~deprecated in the generated invariant anymore. (#6494) This will allow opam to avoid the use of the ocaml-system package unless actually explicitly requested by the user. The opam experience when the ocaml-system compiler is used is known to be prone to a variety of bugs and configuration issues. This alpha made this change in order to provide opam switch create with the same experience as opam init, which will itself not choose ocaml-system anymore since the previous alpha1 release.
• :window: Fallback to the existing Cygwin package manager if its upgrade failed to be fetched (#6495, partial fix for #6474)
• :goggles: Fix various crashes and extreme performance issues when updating some opam repositories (#6448)

:open_book: You can read our blog post for more information, and for even more details you can take a look at the release note or the changelog.

The upgrade instructions are unchanged:

For Unix systems

bash -c "sh <(curl -fsSL https://opam.ocaml.org/install.sh) --version 2.4.0~alpha2"

or from PowerShell for Windows systems

Invoke-Expression "& { $(Invoke-RestMethod https://opam.ocaml.org/install.ps1) } -Version 2.4.0~alpha2"

Please report any issues to the bug-tracker.

Happy hacking, <> <> The opam team <> <> :camel: