Where the hell are my launchers?

[Fredrik Hedberg <fredrik hedberg avafan com>]

Hi,

Among all the other new features of the 0.0.12 release of Beagle, you
might have noticed that your application launchers wont show up in best
anymore.

This, however, is as they say, not a bug, but a feature. 

--

Part of the 0.0.12 release is a totally undocumented tool disguised
under the name "beagle-build-index". It may do horrible things to your
computer and girlfriend if passed the wrong arguments, so listen
carefully.

The beagle-build-index tool is made for building indexes outside of the
Beagle daemon. These indexes can be used in different ways, most notably
to index the system at intervals, or let the system administrator of a
network index peoples data centrally on the server. It's not a tool
that's supposed to be used directly by the user in day to day work.

As the man-page for it didn't get into the 0.0.12 release, here's a
short guide:

        * It takes a number of arguments, the options are described when
        using the --help flag, and it will try to index every path
        that's passed to it but the last, which is where the index will
        be constructed. To create an index for your windows partitions
        that are searchable by all users on the system you can issue
        something like this:
                
                beagle-build-index /windows/c /windows/d /var/cache/beagle/indexes/windows

        * If it finds a directory given by the path specified by the
        last argument. It will try to use that index and add data to it.
        If it doesn't find this directory suitable for some reason, it
        will purge it (delete) and create a new index. THIS HAS THE
        POTENTIAL TO ERASE ALL YOUR DATA IF PASSED THE WRONG ARGUMENT,
        so use it wisely.
        
Beagle will automatically pick up any indexes put in
the /var/cache/beagle/indexes directory (depending on your installation
prefix obviously), but may also be specified with the "beagle-config"
tool, and with command-line arguments to the Beagle daemon.

So to sum it up, if you want your launchers back, index them with
"beagle-build-index", and stick it into the system-indexes path! ;)
Ultimately, this is up to the distribution to take care of (by crawling
the system) and should not bother the user.

Questions? Enjoy!

/F