Dear colleagues,

A big upcoming change to be released with Forester 4.2 in the coming 
weeks is a new user-facing query language that takes advantage of the 
new internal support for relations (on which the new implementation of 
the backmatter is based). This code has lived on a branch until today, 
but it is working well enough that I have put it on ‘main’ this 
morning. To be clear, Forester 4.2 is still not released, but users who 
are building forester manually off ‘main’ will see the new changes.

This is a significant breaking change to existing forests that use 
queries; to facilitate the migration process, I have written a section 
in the Forester 4.2 prerelease changelog 
(http://www.jonmsterling.com/jms-00WK.xml) explaining the new syntax and 
its capabilities. Please let me know if you need any assistance 
rewriting existing queries from your forest, and I’ll be happy to 
help.

This is also a reminder that the querying functionality of forester is 
still considered provisional, so heavy users of queries may continue to 
expect some breaking changes in the future.

Best,
Jon