Version 0.05 of the Oedipus package for maintaining a hierarchical database of Web links has been released. (This package was originally called the ODP package, but the new name is more memorable.) Oedipus is a Python package for creating and maintaining hierarchical trees of Web links. An XML format compatible with the Open Directory Project (ODP) is supported; refer to www.dmoz.org for more information about the ODP. In theory, you can load the entire ODP's database and make it available using Oedipus; in practice, I haven't yet verified that the code scales up to that amount of data. A prototype Zope product is included in the package that allows browsing through an Oedipus database. Versions 0.03 and 0.04 were never announced anywhere, so the list of changes from 0.02 is significant: * Scalability has been improved; while I still haven't processed the whole ODP dataset, I've done the 75Mb structure file, and an unknown chunk of the content file. It stopped when I got bored, not when the script crashed. :) * The code no longer require the XML-SIG's parser package; now it can use xmllib.py to parse input data. * Rearranged the Database class to use Metakit to store the data. It should still be possible to implement different persistence methods, such as Zope's BTree object or GDBM, but I don't feel much of a need to do that. Accordingly, the GDBM and ZODB classes have been dropped. * Lots of other classes were rearranged, too. * The code can now be installed using the Distutils. Oedipus can be downloaded from http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/python/oedipus/ . -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/ Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip in my own lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of something else; and, (2) death is a bunch of blue spheres. -- Tim Peters, 1 May 1998