ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.1.3

[Jon Trowbridge <trow novell com>]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.1.3.

Our focus continues to be on fixing bugs and reducing the Beagle daemon's
memory usage.  This release also contains our new Python bindings, courtesy of
Raphael Slinckx.  With them, you can easily access Beagle search results from
any Python program.  Let the hacking begin.

Remember, Beagle now requires Mono 1.1.10.  But you are already running
1.1.10, because you are nobody's fool.  You are also extremely well-dressed,
and people enjoy your company.


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

To download the 0.1.3 tarball or learn more, visit the Beagle wiki at:
http://www.beagle-project.org

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

Nat Friedman made some cool movies that demonstrate Beagle in action:
http://nat.org/demos

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

London Bills of Mortality:
http://www.davidorme.demon.co.uk/plague10.htm


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
 
Beagle is a tool for indexing and searching your data.  Beagle is improving
rapidly on many fronts, and should work well enough for everyday use.
 
The Beagle daemon transparently monitors your data and updates the index
to reflect any changes.  On an inotify-enabled system, these updates happen
more-or-less in real time.  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.


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

Beagle has many dependencies, and thus can be difficult to compile.
It requires:
* Mono 1.1.10 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better
* Gecko-sharp 2.0
* Gmime 2.1.16
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better

For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have:
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2
* libgsf 1.12.1 and gsf-sharp 0.6
* Either wv 1.2.0, or a *patched* wv 1.0.3 --- the patch is available from
  http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/beagle/wv-libole2-readonly.patch
* An inotify 0.24-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.


CHANGES SINCE 0.1.2
-------------------
Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Python bindings. (Raphael Slinckx, Joe Shaw)
* Fix a crash when trying to search backends without a secondary index. (Joe)
* Use Mono's UnixClient and UnixListener, now that we require mono
  1.1.10. (Joe)
* Use Mono.Unix.Native. (Daniel Drake)
* Added support for index-listener queries: these are special queries that
  return no initial results but which get live query notification of
  every index change. (Jon Trowbridge)

Backends:
* Gaim log backend optimizations and cleanups. (Daniel)
* Fixed a bug in LuceneFileQueryable where it wasnt setting the
  attribute of a file shared across multiple indexables. (Bera)
* Properly use LuceneFileQueryable in blog backends. (Bera)
* Initial release of Konqueror webhistory backend. (Bera)

Filters:
* FilterHtml optimisations, change it to be event driven instead of DOM-based.
  (D Bera)
* Use charset meta-type specified in HTML file to determine file encoding.
  (Bera)
* Extract non-english URLs in html documents correctly. (Bera)
* New Shellscript filter. (Varadhan)
* Fix for reducing memory-allocations in Filter.cs. (Varadhan)
* Fix for reducing memory-allocations in FilterSource.cs (Varadhan)
* Updated image filters. (Lukas)
* Index width and height for JPEG images into the correct property. (Lukas)
* Added fspot:IsIndexed field to images. (Lukas)
* Index category field for .desktop files. (Lukas)

UI/Tools:
* Fixed the blog tile. (Daniel)
* Fix some problems in the beagle-crawl-system script that would result
  in TextCaches being created incorrectly, causing problems when
  searching.  (Sylvain Goletto, Joe)
* Fix a crash of the Epiphany extension on x86-64 machines.  (Stanislav
  Brabec, Joe)
* Save best window settings even when ran with --no-tray. (Bera)
* Allow beagle-extract-content to store output in a file. (Bera)
* Stop live-query when "clear" button is pressed in Best. (Bera)

* Translations:
* Updated Hungarian translation. (Gabor Kelemen)
* Updated Spanish translation. (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)

Everything Else:
* Cleaned up compiler warnings. (Joe, Lukas)
* Small fixes to the included spec file. (Richard Dawe)
* Also include pre-i18n desktop files in the tarball; fixes a problem
  where you couldn't "make" after a "make clean" in the 0.1.2 tarball.
  (Joe)
* Best can now be built on firefox 1.5. (Daniel)
* Allow beagle to be built against Mozilla xulrunner.  (Joe)


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

Yes, we know we use too much memory.  We are working on it.

Extreme spikes in memory usage have been observed in some cases.  Certain
extremely large documents (particularly large HTML files) can temporarily
degrade your system's performance while they are being indexed.  In most
of these cases, the memory is reclaimed by the system relatively quickly after
the document is indexed.  There are other still-unexplained cases of excessive
memory use, particularly on SMP systems.

The file system is now much more robust than ever before.  However, there
are still race conditions that can occur with certain combinations of
file system operations.  In some cases it might be necessary to stop and
restart the daemon.

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 web services interface has been disabled since KN Vijay is no longer
maintaining them.  We strongly recommend that you use the C, C# or Python
client libraries to communicate with the Beagle Daemon.