Beagle Newsletter 8/2/05

[Joe Gasiorek <joe gasiorek gmail com>]

Beagle Newsletter - 2 August 2005

Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter.  If you've new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.beagle-project.org

Releases
----

inotify

   The inotify kernel patch, that we have all come to love and
   adore, has worked its way into the Linus' kernel tree starting
   with 2.6.13-rc3.  This version of inotify, which uses syscalls,
   works with Beagle CVS and is not compatible with Beagle 0.0.12.

Beagle

   Beagle 0.0.12 was released in July and was the most feature
   packed release we've seen in a while.  Amongst the tons of
   bug fixes things like a C API, static index support and the
   ability to run without extended attributes have been added
   to Beagle.


Hacking
----

Running over NFS

   Beagle certainly comes as a great resource to traditional
   desktop users but those of us who have a home directory
   that is NFS mounted have been limited by NFS not supporting
   extended attributes.  Recently, work has been done to allow
   Beagle to run on file systems that do not have a supported EA
   scheme such as as NFS and Reiser4.  However, on these 
   systems Beagle is still much slower so you are strongly 
   encouraged to use a file  system with extended attributes enabled.

Static indexes

   To aid system administrators who may have to deal with
   many users logged into a server at once Fredrik has created
   the beagle-build-index tool which will create a static index of
   the directory it is given.  This tool can be scripted to work
   similar to the standard updatedb tool.  Dave Richards
   has done an excellent job testing the static indexing tools
   for Beagle and will be working on making sure Beagle works
   well with this style of usage.

libbeagle

   An API for the C programming language has been developed
   as to allow Beagle to work with a huge verity of applications.
   Work has begun on several applications, including Nautilus,
   to include support for Beagle.

Maildir Support

   A filter for indexing maildirs is now included in Beagle.  Beagle
   not only indexes the mail but the attachments as well.  Mail
   applications that use this style of storage, such as KMail, are
   able to open the search results.  It should be noted that this work
   is ongoing and through help of the community, developers are
   trying to incorporate maildirs into Beagle.

Galago Support

   Lukas has been hacking on the Galago support that is now in
   Beagle.  Now, if you have Galago installed, you can check to
   see if your buddies are online right there in your Best search results.

Start up time

   Daniel Drake has worked on improving the start up procedure
   for Beagle.  By combining the scanning and crawling procedures
   into one, Beagle is able to start up more quickly and limit its
   time spent hammering the disk.


Project
----

Why won't my IM logs work?

   Beagle 0.0.12 had a slight problem with it displaying IM logs in
   search results.  Beagle CVS has a fix for this problem, so fear
   not, the next release will be set to go with your IM logs.

You mean I really don't have to patch my kernel anymore?

   Yes, this might come as a shock to some of you, but you won't
   have to spend so much time working on creating inotify enabled
   kernels anymore.  With the Beagle CVS version of inotify in many
   Linux distributions unstable branches there is less need for
   community packaging of the kernel.  There is, however, plenty of
   other work to go around.  Beagle frontends can now be written in
   C or C# so there is little excuse for you not to work on a frontend
   you enjoy.  There are, as always, plenty of filters to be written,
   applications to be supported and bugs to be squashed so keep on
   helping the Beagle project.  Even if you are not a hacker, by testing
   Beagle and reporting the bugs you may run into as well as documenting
   your findings on the wiki you are helping out the community immensely.


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