Pellet 1.5.2: The May Day Release
by Mike Smith
Thanks to support from some new friends at Moody’s KMV, we were able to briefly detour off the path to Pellet 1.6 and have released Pellet 1.5.2 as a bug fix release, back-porting many fixes to the 1.5 release tree. Several of the fixes address issues specific to the Jena interface to Pellet, so if you use Pellet from Jena (or TopBraid Composer), this release may be of particular interest to you.
Most of the changes in this release were made to address issues reported by end users – keep up the good work, and we’ll try to keep pace with fixes. You can visit the Pellet trac report listing the resolved issues for full details.
It’s worth noting how this release came about. We had planned for 1.5.1 to be the final release in the 1.5 series. Moody’s contacted us because they had identified a bug that was blocking the critical path of an internal project. We were able to resolve the issue, and they were motivated to have the fix made public in a release that would be a drop-in upgrade of 1.5.1. This is an example of how commercial support can be a multiplier on the value of open source development.
There’s another point to make from this example as well. Often on pellet-users we get help requests from people that are reluctant to make the data they’re working with public. This leads to frustration on both sides – we can’t reproduce the bug without the data and they don’t get a fix. This release demonstrates that this problem is manageable, but it requires these users to contact us and consider the commercial support options.
We expect to rev the public releases of Pronto and OwlSight in the next week to pull in these changes.
Update 18:00 EDT: I’ve sent a release announcement to the mailing list that contains a bit more detail on the specific changes since 1.5.1.
