Beagle 0.0.6

[Jon Trowbridge <trow novell com>]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.0.6.


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

To download the 0.0.6 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

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

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

I hope to someday visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology:
http://www.mjt.org



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.



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.x should also work.)
* An inotify 0.18-enabled kernel
* D-BUS 0.23.1
* Evolution-sharp 0.6
* Gecko-sharp
* Gsf-sharp
* Gmime


CHANGES SINCE 0.0.5
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Indexing now happens outside of the begaled process, which allows us to
  substantially reduce our memory consumption (Jon Trowbridge)
* Updated to use inotify 0.18 (Robert Love)
* Use UTF-8 encoding when converting filenames from inotify (Joe Shaw)
* Added support for both D-BUS 0.23 and HEAD (Joe)
* Make the indexer more robust against filters that throw exceptions (Jon)
* Indexable serialization fixes (Jon)
* Put an upper limit on scheduler idle time (Jon)

Backends:
* Watch for .tomboy if it doesn't exist (Larry Reaves)
* Added an ExceptionHandleingThread class and port all the backends to
  use it for easier debugging (Joe)
* Non-existent directories no long kill the Evolution backend (Joe)
* Fixed mime encoding issues in mail headers (Joe)
* If .gaim or .gaim/logs doesn't exist, watch for them with inotify
  (Robert Van Gorkom)
* Some small launcher backend fixes (Jon)

Filters:
* Hot text and StructuralBreak fixes in the Filter base class
  (Veerapuram Varadhan)
* Assume ASCII for HTML files with unknown encodings (Joe)
* Made the PDF filter more robust (Joe)
* Pass the correct parameters to pdfinfo (Urko Frenandez)
* Lots of snippets fixes (Varadhan)
* Only initialize wv1 once (Varadhan)
* Lots of other filter fixes (Varadhan)
* PHP filter fixes (Rich Midwinter)
* C# filter fixes (Varadhan, with a shout out to Rafael Slinckx)

UI:
* Filter web history indexing by domain (Tom van Schwerdtner)
* Mozilla extension UI enhancements (James Viapond)
* Fixed best searches from the mozilla extensions (Rich Midwinter)
* Fixed the entry focus in Best (Stephen Solka)
* Added a right-click menu to Best (Shobith Alva)
* Fixed charset encoding issues in Best (Joe, Jonas Klingstedt)
* Improved Best startup behaviour if started with a query (Christopher Orr)
* Fixed music tile ID3 tag bug (Lukas Lipka)
* IM viewer tuning (Lukas)
* Gaim-remote fixes (Lukas)
* Fixed launching Evolution and sending mail from the mail tile (Nicolas
  Trangez)
* Fixed rendering bug in TileCanvas (Lukas)

Everything Else:
* Build fixes (Everyone)
* Testing and Bug Reports (Everyone)
* Hand-to-hand combat with D-BUS (Joe)
* Man pages (Robert)



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

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...  but we now
grow *much* more slowly than previously-released versions.  It still needs to
be periodically killed and restarted, but the time for it to get too big is
now best measured in days rather than hours.  Our Mono GC issues are mostly
resolved; our problems now seem to be leaks in the C# D-BUS bindings.

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.