Beagle 0.1.1

[Jon Trowbridge <trow novell com>]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.1.1.

This version contains fixes for a number of bugs and one major new feature:
a new KMail backend written by the redoubtable D Bera.


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

To download the 0.1.1 tarball or learn more, visit the Beagle wiki at:
http://www.beagle-project.org

Joe Gasiorek writes a Beagle newsletter.  You can read it at:
http://www.beagle-project.org/Newsletter

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

George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (among others)
were granted honorary French citizenship during the French Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_honorary_French_citizenship_during_the_French_Revolution


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 1.1.7 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* gtk-sharp 1.9.5 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
* 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 0.1.0
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Keep track of the number of tasks we've processed in a given run
  through the scheulder and yield if we pass a threshold from the CPU
  stuff.  (Joe)
* Add a new task type which removes all items which match a certain
  property.  (Joe)
* Fixed leaking index file descriptors. (Daniel Drake)
* Force the encoding of XmlSerializer to be UTF-8 since it defaults to
  the current system encoding.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Initial KMail support. (D Bera)
* Fix an exception in the file system backend when trying to ignore
  paths whose parent wasn't also being watched.  (Lukas Lipka, Joe)
* Correctly handle removed items in the Evolution Data Server backend.
  (Joe)
* Use a new URI scheme that is compatible with Evolution 2.4, so that
  calendar items and contacts can be opened in Evo.  (Joe, Lukas)
* Fix an exception in the Gaim backend when not using inotify.  (Joe)
* Rename the IMLog backend to GaimLog. (Lukas)
* Better handling of directories with exotic permissions in the file
  system backend. (Jon Trowbridge)

Filters:
* Add a bunch of special text mime types found in shared-mime-info for
  the plain text filter.  (Joe)
* Support OOo Draw files in OpenOffice filter. (David Richards)

UI/Tools:
* Fix an exception that would show up if you used beagle-index-url when
  the IndexingService backend wasn't enabled.  (Joe)
* Allow best to start beagled on amd64. (Jack Miller)

Translations:
* Updated Bulgarian translation. (Alexander Shopov)
* Updated Chinese translation. (fwang)
* Updated Dutch translation. (Wouter Bolsterlee)
* Updated German translation. (Hendrik Brandt)
* Updated Japanese translation. (Takeshi AIHANA)
* Updated Vietnamese translation. (clyties)

Everything Else:
* Build the Evolution Data Server backend into its own assembly and
  install it into the system backend directory, allowing distributors to
  package and ship it separately from the main Beagle package.  (Joe)


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

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.

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 cases
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, in particular on SMP systems.

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.