Beagle Newsletter - 11/4/04

[Joe Gasiorek <joe gasiorek gmail com>]

Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If your new to
the project you can read up about it the projects website:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle


Hacking
-----

Stability

    Joe Shaw and Jon Trowbridge have been working to improve the speed
and efficiency of Beagle and its related tools.  Specific attention
has been paid to initial indexing of files by the daemon and rendering
speed for Best.

Notification Area and Best

    The tray icon code has been moved into Best.

Gecko-Sharp

    Dave Camp has put significant effort into moving Best's rendering
system from gtk-html to gecko-sharp.  Although this introduces a new
dependency for the project, the new interface speaks for itself.  This
change makes it a much easier step towards the design teams goals.
Check it out for yourself:  http://nat.org/best.png

Kernel

    Robert Love's inotify patch has been packaged for many different
distributions.  Check the wiki for where to find the latest kernel for
your system.


Project
-----

Website

    Garrett Lesage and Ben Kahn have created a excellent new website
for the Beagle project.  You can visit it at
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle

Beagle Hacking Guide Update

    The Beagle Hacking Guide has been updated to include more
information about each of the different ways to code Beagle.  This
guide is meant to aid programmers in getting an idea to code without
the hassle of reading thousands of lines of code.  The guide is
located at:  http://beaglewiki.org/index.php/BeagleHacking

Re-organized installation guide

    Kevin Godby re-organized the Beagle Installation Guide into a much
easier to browse document.  You can find the installation guide on
www.beaglewiki.org

Design Wiki

    There is a new wiki that includes many new design ideas for Beagle
interfaces.  You can read all about the ideas and there use cases at:
http://primates.ximian.com/~glesage/wiki/doku.php?id=beagle


What are people talking about?
-------

CPU Usage

    There has been a lot of discussion on the mailing list lately on
the efficiency of the Beagle daemon.  Currently Beagle is very greedy
about CPU usage when doing its initial indexing.

On-line vs. Offline sources

    There has been concern expressed over whether or not on-line
resources should be included in search results.  Problems come in when
trying to compare results from different backends if some of the
results are not coming from the indexer.


New Requirements
-----

Gecko-Sharp
Evolution-Sharp

As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter
should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe
Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com