Release notes for LensKit 0.8

The Git changelog and the list of closed tickets and pull requests provide more information on what has happened, including bugs that have been fixed.

• Cleaned up cursor utilities, moving all methods from Cursors2 to Cursors. The old Cursors2 methods are deprecated and will be removed before 1.0 is released.

• Implemented a new evaluation framework that uses XML files to directly configure evaluators (#issue(115)). This replaces the Ant plugin. Eventually, a Maven plugin will be added that runs these evaluations; for now, they can be run with exec-maven-plugin. See the lenskit-eval-demo project configuration for an example. With this comes the fix for #issue(115) as well.

• Provide example evaluation configurations run as integration tests. lenskit-eval contains a basic one, and lenskit-eval-demo contains a more extensive set complete with R-based post-analysis. To run these, activate the smoketest profile and set the grouplens.mldata.acknowledge property to yes to acknowledge that you are abiding by the licensing terms for the MovieLens ML100K data set, which is automatically downloaded and used by the demo evaluations.