Summary of API changes committed over last couple of days

[Karl Wright <da...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I committed two major changes over the last couple of days which are
designed to make it easier to write connectors and also to position MCF for
potential future changes.

First, any time a connector formerly returned a version string, it now
returns a VersionContext object.  This object contains the version string,
plus a snapshot of the ConfigParams and the Specification objects that were
in place at the time the version string was calculated.  So it is no longer
necessary to unpack the version string inside a connector to obtain
appropriate information that could affect document processing or indexing.

A side-effect of the first change is that the interface
IIncrementalIngester is no longer backwards compatible with previous
versions of the interface.  If there are people out there who have written
other agent types, this will be a disruption -- but I don't know of any
such usage.

The second change involves how version strings are created by repository
connectors, and should also clarify the options available to the API for
processing.

Thanks,
Karl