Sunshine 0.42 for Linux/GTK available

[Colin Dunstan]

Here is a quicky for all Linux fans among you. Laurens has just released the first version of Sunrise for Linux. He only tested it with a Knoppix Live-CD, so make sure to drop some feedback here in case you encounter any glitches or crashes.

[hacker]

Well, it seems to work... but Laurens already knows I'm his hardest critic, so here goes (and some of these are the same bugs that plague JPluck):

1. Changing a site's depth parameters breaks any subsequent fetch until you close and reload Sunrise (and JPluck). As a test, create a site that points to the Wired News site, depth of 3, and restrict to directory. Fetch it, then go back into it and modify the properties to have "No restriction" on the depth, and try to fetch again. BOOM.
2. No tables support
3. No robots.txt support
4. No random or specific delay support between requests (NOT adding this will rapidly get Sunrise blocked from many sites. Many sites already block JPluck for this exact reason)
5. No specific parameters for compression (or lack of compression, which in some cases, is desired for display speed) There is only "Default" and "Best". How about "None"? What about image compression vs. non-image compression properties?
6. No way to modify specific AppInfo data (Beam, CopyProtect, etc.)
7. No way to set accellerators on the menus for shortcuts (ala gtk2+, KDE dynamic accellerators)
8. And as with JPluck as well, using Sunrise to fetch VERY large documents fails, even when allocating 3gb RAM to the JVM.

Its definately a good start for people just getting their feet wet with Plucker distilling, but for high-performance, production-quality distilling (thousands of documents per-hour), it doesn't quite fit the bill... yet.

Keep at it Laurens, I'll keep offering my feedback.