Re: Beagle roadmap.
- From: Martin Sevior <msevior physics unimelb edu au>
- To: alex beatniksoftware com
- Cc: dashboard-hackers gnome org
- Subject: Re: Beagle roadmap.
- Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 11:32:35 +1000
On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 10:38, Alex Graveley wrote:
> I would also add "Screenshoting" as a Phase 2 (3?) deliverable. Beagle
> absolutely needs to present memorable visual imagery to go along with
> the tiles.
>
> This means that PDFs, MS Office docs, OpenOffice docs, Webpages, movies,
> emails, music [1], people [2], all need to have good thumbnail
> screenshots to represent them. No matter if the content is local or on
> the internet.
>
I have some code that uses AbiWord to filter all these word processor
docs and make screenshots of them. AbiWord will be run as background
process while indexing and screenshotting.
I'm happy to to work on using this code as a filter provided there is
not a fundamental objection to incorporating it into the whole
system.
So I won't mind if I'm told:
"Your code sucks, it crashes all the time, and leaks mem, and is too
slow and..."
I will mind if I'm told:
"We only do OpenOffice here. We don't want a competing product to
confuse our customers."
Sorry for being paranoid but I only have so much time and there are a
lot of things I'd like to do with it.
Thanks
Martin
> -Alex
>
> [1] Album covers
> [2] Buddy Icons, Livejournal pics, etc
>
> On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 20:02, Nat Friedman wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > Our little search project is growing, so I'm going to hand out some
> > tasks and goals to those Novell people working on Beagle. I decided to
> > send this to the public list so that everyone knows what we're up to.
> > Some of this is just informational, so there's a global view as to what
> > we're doing.
> >
> > Novell people, please focus on these things, so that we can avoid
> > dissipation.
> >
> > The work is broken into two phases. I'd like everyone to work on phase
> > I, and then when that's done, everyone starts to work on phase II.
> > People should not jump ahead from phase I to phase II. As long as your
> > comrades in arms have phase I work left, so do you :-). This obviously
> > does not apply to non-Novell employees ;-).
> >
> > Phase I
> > =======
> >
> > Beagle Core Infrastructure
> > --------------------------
> >
> > Team: Jon Trowbridge, Dave Camp and Joe Shaw
> >
> > Our mission is to make Beagle usable on a day-to-day basis. The
> > main things that we currently lack for a usable Beagle are:
> >
> > a) Not crashing or failing, most of the time.
> >
> > We need to be more fault tolerant and to present
> > meaningful errors and debug logs to users in the event
> > of failures, so that they can file reasonable bug
> > reports. Things like Raja's error messages in Best are
> > helpful to users here too.
> >
> > Dave's recent log work is a good first step; we should
> > make sure we deploy errors everywhere.
> >
> > b) Run all day.
> >
> > The daemon needs to be able to run for a long time
> > without horking your system. We need to figure out how
> > to 'nice' the daemon's activities so that it doesn't
> > take down the rest of the system. We also need a
> > mechanism for periodically restarting the daemon,
> > because the Mono GC is not precise enough to allow us to
> > run forever without eating all your RAM.
> >
> > c) Index mail.
> >
> > A large portion of people's information is in their
> > mail, so we can't claim to be a usable search solution
> > until we can search mail. The primary goal will be
> > Evolution mail integration; patches for other mail
> > clients will, of course, be accepted.
> >
> > We need to be able to do a serviceable job of searching
> > mail without requiring major changes in Evolution or
> > building out of a separate patchset. So, any patches
> > required should be (i) built by the Beagle team, and
> > (ii) included into Evolution 2.2 (feature freeze
> > January).
> >
> > For disconnected IMAP users, this is relatively
> > straightforward, since Evolution caches IMAP MIME parts
> > in separate files on the disk; we can use inotify to
> > notice new email getting cached here. The downside, of
> > course, is that we require users to cache their IMAP
> > mail locally in order to search it. This doesn't seem
> > so bad to me, though, since I'd rather cache my mail
> > locally than fire off network queries to my IMAP server
> > every time I do a search in Beagle.
> >
> > For local mail users this is more difficult. Ideally we
> > would use Camel's index directly and write a Camel query
> > driver, but it seems that Camel does not provide the
> > locking we need. So we're going to need to actually
> > index local mail ourselves.
> >
> > Indexing local mail is made hard by the fact that mbox
> > files and ev-summaries can get very large. So, this
> > will be a challenge.
> >
> > I put this in Phase I because I think that searching
> > mail is so important, it cannot be put off till later.
> > This will mean we need to get patches into the Evo dev
> > branch and Beagle users will have to run Evo snaps.
> >
> > These three items will be our focus in Beagle proper, until we
> > can declare ourselves "reasonably usable."
> >
> > Filters
> > -------
> >
> > Team: Veerapuram Varadhan
> >
> > The mission is to make sure Beagle can read the most important
> > files off your disk.
> >
> > Jon and Varadhan wrote up a task list for this. Essentially,
> > the following filters are important and need work, in
> > approximate priority order: MS Office, PDF, PostScript,
> > Monodoc, RTF, Texi, Man, ID3 tags, RPM.
> >
> > Varadhan will be making his way through this list as best he
> > can. Anyone else who wants to work on these is obviously
> > welcome; filters are one of the most parallelizable pieces of
> > work in Beagle, so everyone is encouraged to join.
> >
> > Snapshot Packages
> > -----------------
> >
> > Team: Chris Lahey, Duncan Mak
> >
> > To keep up with the fast pace of change in the various parts of
> > the architecture, we're going to need regular snapshot packages
> > of the various bits of the Mono Desktop Extensions set.
> >
> > The following packages will be snapshotted many times a day by a
> > cron job:
> >
> > dbus, evolution-sharp, libgalago, libgalago-gtk, galago-daemon,
> > galago-sharp, galago-gtk-sharp, tomboy, f-spot, timeline,
> > beagle, dashboard.
> >
> > [ Someone shout out if I forgot something important. ]
> >
> > Chris will build these for SUSE 9.0/9.1/9.2 and NLD. If it's
> > easy, maybe also for FC3.
> >
> > Let's put these somewhere easy to get at, maybe an open carpet
> > server that replaces nat.org. Chris and Jon to determine where
> > these go (mdesnaps.org? iheartmde.org?)
> >
> > Evo snaps will come from the usual place (Rodney to chime in
> > here).
> >
> > inotify / kernel assistance
> > ---------------------------
> >
> > Team: Robert Love
> >
> > Robert is going to finish his inotify work, so that beagle can
> > find out when things change on the file system. Robert's on top
> > of this.
> >
> > UI/Interaction Design
> > ---------------------
> >
> > Team: Tuomas Kuosmanen
> >
> > Tuomas will be our go-to guy for search UI. This encompasses:
> > Best, the tray search tool, dashboard and the information
> > browser.
> >
> > Tasks:
> >
> > a) Collect all mockups/designs.
> >
> > Garrett did a bunch of designs a few months ago. We
> > should put all of these on a web page so that they're
> > accessible/viewable by everyone. New mockups should go
> > to the web page also.
> >
> > This should be done on beaglewiki.org, for easy
> > editability.
> >
> > b) Tile design.
> >
> > We need updated tile designs, implemented in HTML, that
> > include easy access to operations like sharing,
> > printing, presence, etc.
> >
> > c) Tray UI design.
> >
> > We have the beginnings of a tray applet in CVS.
> > However, the UI is awful. We need a mockup of what this
> > should look like.
> >
> > d) Best / information browser / Dashboard.
> >
> >
> > File Selector Integration
> > -------------------------
> >
> > Team: Federico Mena
> >
> > We need to be able to search from the file selector. Federico
> > is generalizing the filesel API to make this cleaner; he is also
> > in charge of implementing filesel integration with Beagle.
> >
> >
> > Presence in People Tiles
> > ------------------------
> >
> > Team: Robert Love
> >
> > People tiles should show presence, using Galago. Christian
> > Hammond has created nice Galago# bindings for us, including some
> > widgets that we could embed into People tiles.
> >
> > Tray UI
> > -------
> >
> > Team: Chris Lahey
> >
> > Implement the UI design that Tuomas creates. Start with what we
> > have now, and make it usable.
> >
> > Web Page
> > --------
> >
> > Team: Garrett Lesage
> >
> > Alex set a new benchmark for open source project web site design
> > with the tomboy website:
> >
> > http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy
> >
> > We should try to reach this level of cleanliness and information
> > content for Beagle.
> >
> > Garrett should create a new web site for Beagle to replace the
> > one we have. Garrett, the address for the Beagle web site is
> > www.gnome.org/projects/beagle; go ahead and just check in a new
> > web site to GNOME CVS.
> >
> > Also, we need a T-shirt design.
> >
> > Phase II
> > ========
> >
> > This stuff is a bit less concrete than Phase I, but we will be able to
> > flesh it out better when we declare Phase I done.
> >
> > Metadata System
> > ---------------
> >
> > Team: Jon Trowbridge, Robert Love, Joe Shaw
> >
> > We need a system for storing explicit relationships between
> > things in your life.
> >
> > For example:
> >
> > "You downloaded /home/blah/foo.c from
> > http://nat.org/stuff";
> >
> > "funny.jpg came from the mail 'Dude, check this out'
> > from rml novell com"
> >
> > "Some parts of the file MyStrategy.doc were cut and
> > pasted from RobertsStrategy.doc"
> >
> > "Objects a, b, c and d are part of the Beagle Team's
> > team space."
> >
> > Which can be represented as subject/verb/object triplets:
> >
> > <file:///home/blah/foo.c,
> > downloaded-from,
> > http://nat.org/stuff>
> >
> > <file:///full/path/funny.jpg,
> > attachment-from,
> > mail:///local/folder/uid?9238u4982374>
> >
> > <file:///home/nat/MyStrategy.doc,
> > cut-and-paste,
> > ifolder:///NatAndRobertsSharedArea/RobertsStrategy.doc>
> >
> > <a,explicit-relationship,team:///BeagleTeam>
> >
> > Note that all of these are explicit relationships; the implicit
> > relationships, like "this web page is similar to this document"
> > are discoverable, and don't need to be stored.
> >
> > Also note that we need our metadata system to cache some handy
> > relationships for us that might be discoverable. For example:
> >
> > <http://nat.org/,
> > created-by,
> > person://NatFriedman>
> >
> > <mail:///local/folder/uid?9238u4982374,
> > sender,
> > mailto:rml novell com>
> >
> > This will make these relationships easy to search.
> >
> > We need a simple metadata store for explicit relationships and
> > cached implicit relationships in Beagle. This should have a
> > nice API on it for storing stuff.
> >
> > Once we have this, we can start instrumenting applications and
> > making them store metadata in Beagle. We can also do things
> > like create 'watchers' which store metadata as you use your
> > system; imagine if timeline were pimped out to store
> > relationsihps between files, mails or web pages you view at the
> > same time.
> >
> > Various thoughts:
> >
> > * The implementation should focus on getting something
> > to work soon, not solving all the world's problems.
> >
> > * The backing store will be Lucene; perhaps EAs will be
> > involved in Linux on the filesystem.
> >
> > * We need a simple API that can be used from C to store
> > metadata.
> >
> > * We should have a simple RDF-like interface for
> > metadata query results.
> >
> > * We need a documented universal URI scheme.
> >
> > * Team definitions should live in the addressbook.
> >
> > * The implementation should focus on getting something
> > to work soon, not solving all the world's problems. :-)
> >
> > Once we have this thing, and the team notion, we can build the
> > information browser, which will really be fun.
> >
> > Nautilus Search Integration
> > ---------------------------
> >
> > Team: Dave Camp
> >
> > We need a simple file search interface in Nautilus. This should
> > include emblem searching.
> >
> >
> > Dashboard
> > ---------
> >
> > Team: Joe Shaw
> >
> > Dashboard needs to use Beagle tiles, needs cluechaining for
> > addressbook contacts, needs to track focus properly, needs an
> > a11y-based observer, and needs specific frontend instrumentation
> > for Evolution, OpenOffice, Firefox.
> >
> > Information Browser
> > -------------------
> >
> > Team: Jon Trowbridge
> >
> > This is Jon's baby, to be explained through mockups, etc, as we
> > go.
> >
> > Tiles
> > -----
> >
> > Team: Federico Mena
> >
> > We need drag-and-droppable tiles, a better tile widget system,
> > etc.
> >
> > Monodoc Integration
> > -------------------
> >
> > Team: Veerapuram Varadhan
> >
> > Monodoc should use Beagle to do a full keyword search of its
> > contents.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Dashboard-hackers mailing list
> > Dashboard-hackers gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
> >
> >
>
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> Dashboard-hackers gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
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