v0.2.5

0.2.5 (3 March 2026):

Added:

• New GUI app: Raven-xdot-viewer.

  • This is a utility app for viewing GraphViz graphs (.dot, .gv, .xdot).
  • Start with raven-xdot-viewer.
  • In a future version, this technology will be deployed in Librarian for navigating the nonlinear chat history.

• Tools:

  • New command-line tool: Raven-csv2bib.
    • This converts comma-separated values (.csv) to BibTeX.
    • The first row of the .csv file must consist of column headers. Fields with these names will be populated in the BibTeX output.
      • For use with Raven-visualizer, the fields Author, Year, Title are required, and the field Abstract is optional.
        • If your dataset has no meaningful text descriptions beyond an item title, you can omit the whole Abstract column.
        • But if you have text descriptions, including them should improve the accuracy of the semantic map, by making it easier for Raven to detect which items are semantically similar.
      • Arbitrary other fields can be included and will be transcribed into the output BibTeX.
    • Author names use BibTeX format.
      • If an item has multiple authors, separate them with the lowercase literal word "and".
      • Each author name can have up to four parts (first, von, jr., last).
      • Each author name must be in one of three formats:
        • First von Last ("First Last" if no "von" part)
        • von Last, First ("Last, First" if no "von" part)
        • von Last, Jr., First
      • For more details, see: https://www.bibtex.com/f/author-field/

Changed:

• Bump minimum Python version to 3.11.
  • Upgrading to Raven 0.2.5 requires a fresh reinstall.
    • To do this, delete the .venv hidden subdirectory inside your top-level Raven directory, then pdm install.
    • It should still remember if you had CUDA enabled, and if so, automatically install the NVIDIA packages.
  • Raven requires av for its audio handling.
    • Particularly, the audio encoder for transporting TTS audio over the network from Raven-server to Raven-librarian needs av.
    • Recent versions of av may require installing some upgrades.
      • FFMPEG 7 is now required. Older versions (4, 5, 6) are no longer supported.
        • To see which version you have, ffmpeg -version (note only one dash).
        • For Ubuntu 22.04 based systems (e.g. Linux Mint 21.3), there is a PPA; for how to add it, see e.g. here.
      • To be able to build av:
        • Beside ffmpeg itself, you will need the various related lib*-dev packages from the same repository. You can use the synaptic GUI to locate them easily (filter the view by Origin).
        • From the distro's default repositories, you'll need clang.
        • You'll also need cython. For this, pip install cython (in the environment where you're running pdm) should work.
  • The Python upgrade was needed to support the Hindsight AI agent memory system that will be later used by Raven-librarian.