Geneagrapher

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*Release date: unreleased*

*Redesigned data-grabbing interface to allow for the introduction of
new data grabbers.

*Added a new data grabber that builds a local cache of records. This
allows subsequent geneagrapher calls to obtain cached records and
avoiding a request over the network.

*Added local test data, allowing for many tests that were previously
making network requests to simply load local data. This speeds up
running the test suite substantially.

*Substantial refactoring and internal changes, including:

-Better code coverage by the tests.

-Updated packaging to more modern standards.

-Improved test documentation and naming.

-Internal graph structure now only stores the genealogy
graph. Previously, the graph structure retained all edges from the
Math Genealogy Project information.

-Data is now extracted from Math Genealogy Project web pages using
BeautifulSoup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/). This
means that the Geneagrapher now has an external dependency, but I
believe the advantages for testing and code readability, for this
case, outweigh the disadvantage of taking a dependency.

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*Release date: 11-Aug-2011*

*A test in Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 was broken by new information added
to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This release fixes the test,
but does not change the functionality from version 0.2.1-r1.

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*Release date: 03-Nov-2010*

*A few tests in Geneagrapher 0.2.1 have become broken since that
version was released. This release fixes those tests, but does not
change the functionality from version 0.2.1.

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*Release date: 01-Sep-2009*

Changes made for this release:
*Multiple advisors are now captured correctly. While this problem was
manifesting itself, ancestor trees were coming out as a branch-free
tree.

*Added a test for the multiple advisor case, which enables quicker
recognition of similar problems.

*Updated a few tests that had become broken due to updates in the Math
Genealogy Project’s database.

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*Release date: 07-Oct-2008*

*This Geneagrapher release slightly changes an installation-related
file to enable installation on machines running Python 2.6 that have
not yet installed Python setuptools.

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*Release date: 06-Oct-2008*

Here are the most significant changes, from the perspective of the
user:
*Descendant trees. Now trees can be built placing a starting node at
the top and graphing all of its descendants. A couple points on this:

-These sorts of graphs tend to have a lot of “fan out” because some
people have a lot of students.

-Be careful. Do not inadvertently (or intentionally!) run a job that
requests the data for thousands of nodes.

*Better character handling. I believe all characters are now displayed
correctly, as long as the generated dot file is processed by Graphviz
a certain way (see the Geneagrapher 0.2 Usage Guide).

*No limit on the number of starting nodes.

*This is a client application, meaning the user installs it somewhere
and runs it there. Furthermore, this package only generates the input
file to Graphviz, so that also needs to be installed. This is
probably more of a hassle than most Geneagrapher users want to go
through (not all, though), but this is just the first step.

Additionally, behind-the-scenes changes happened:

*Large portions of the code were rewritten.

*Added a test suite to make it more maintainable. In particular, this
should allow quicker diagnosis and modifications when the Mathematics
Genealogy Project pages have changed.