ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.0.4

[Jon Trowbridge <trow ximian com>]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.0.4.


OUR MANY URLS
-------------

To download the 0.0.4 tarball, visit the Beagle web page at
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle.

There is lots of useful information about compiling and using Beagle on the
wiki:
http://www.beaglewiki.org

If you are running SuSE or the Novell Linux Desktop, we have an open carpet
server with snapshots and packages for all of the dependencies:
http://segfault.cam.novell.com

Joe Gasiorek writes a regular Beagle newsletter.  You can read it at:
http://www.beaglewiki.org/index.php/Newsletters

The latest gossip is available at:
http://www.planetbeagle.org

We still talk about Beagle on the dashboard-hackers mailing list:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers

Vientiane is the capital of Laos.  The recent ASEAN summit was held there:
http://www.laoembassy.com/discover/sites/vientianecity.htm



WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------

Beagle is a tool for indexing and searching your data.  It is in an early
stage of development and should be considered experimental.  Beagle is
improving rapidly on many fronts, but it is not yet stable enough for
full-time, everyday use.

The Beagle daemon transparently monitors your data and updates the index
to reflect any changes.  So for example,

* Files are immediately indexed when they are created, are re-indexed
  when they are modified, and are dropped from the index upon
  deletion.
* E-mails are indexed upon arrival.
* IM conversations are indexed as you chat, a line at a time.

Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the prodigious Doug
Cutting.

Best is a graphical tool for searching the index that the daemon creates.
Best doesn't query the index directly; it passes the search terms to the 
daemon and the daemon sends any matches back to Best.  Best then renders the
results and allows you to perform useful actions on the matching objects.

Indexing your data requires a fair amount of computing power, but the Beagle
daemon tries to be as unobtrusive as possible.  It contains a scheduler that
works to prioritize tasks and control CPU usage, based on whether or not
you are actively using your workstation.



MILESTONE ONE
-------------

Our plan is to produce a usable version of beagle that can be shipped as part
of SUSE 9.3.  This almost exactly corresponds to the timeline for GNOME 2.10.
We call this goal "Milestone One," and the tasks required to reach that goal
are labeled as such in bugzilla.gnome.org.

This is the second release since we began to work towards this milestone.  We
are planning to release approximately every two weeks.



DEPENDENCY HECK
---------------

Beagle has many dependencies, and thus can be difficult to compile.
It requires:
* The full Mono stack, including Gtk#. (We are developing under 1.1.x,
  but 1.0.4 should also work.)
* An inotify-enabled kernel
* CVS D-BUS
* Evolution-sharp 0.6
* Gecko-sharp
* Gsf-sharp
* Gmime



CHANGES SINCE 0.0.3
-------------------

Daemon:
* Improved relevancy scoring (Joe Shaw)
* Lots of D-BUS clean-up (Jon Trowbridge)
* Filter architecture clean-up (Jon)
* Improved Extended Attribute handling (Jon)
* If EAs can't be set on a file, store the information in a
  fallback database (Jon)
* Expose more information about the indexes via D-BUS (Jon)
* Added beagle-index-info script (Jon)
* Initial lucene optimize operations now threaded for faster
  start-up (Jon)

Backends:
* Addressbook is now synched to a lucene index (Dave Camp)
* New gmime-based mail backend that uses lucene for indexing (Joe)
* Blam backend fixes (Fredrik Hedberg)

Filters:
* Added meta-data for .ppt files (Veerapuram Varadhan)
* Improved RTF filter (Varadhan)
* Count the number of slides in .sxi files (Varadhan)
* Improved audio file filters (Rafael Slinckx)

UI:
* Updated web tile (Christopher Orr)
* Show folder and account properties in the mail tile (Joe)
* Filter results by hit type (Joe)
* Save search history (Joe)
* More stetic (Tuomas Kuosmanen)
* Tile art updates (Tuomas)
* "View Source" accelerator (Fredrik)
* Ctrl+L can focus the search bar (James Vipond)
* File tile uses nautilus-sendto if it's available (Dave)
* Mail tile improvements (Joe, Tuomas)
* Pretty-print dates in image tiles (Joe)



KNOWN ISSUES
------------

Some operations still cause us to consume too much of the CPU, degrading
interactive performance.

It doesn't take that much ingenuity to confuse the file system backend.
Certain operations are yet not fully implemented -- in particular,
the right thing doesn't happen when you move a file.

The beagle daemon grows over time, using more and more memory.  This seems to
be a combination of Mono GC idiosyncrasies and leaks in unmanaged code that we
call into.  Don't worry, this will be fixed.

At this point in development, we cannot commit to stable APIs or file formats.
You will almost certainly need to delete your indexes and start again at
some point in the future.

The Tomboy backend is disabled pending the resolution of an inotify bug.