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Re: ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.8

Joe: You might wanna commit the patch for using the correct tbird
executable and do a mini-release for packagers (specifically those of
debian systems). Sorry I never got a chance to commit, but I haven't
had access to everything for a while, and won't for a little while
longer. Also make sure to do the same with the Contact Viewer or well
have a lot of users who see the Thunderbird Backend as worthless.

Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik

On 8/17/06, Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.8.

We have been very active since our 0.2.7 release in June.  This
version has many new features, including a Thunderbird backend,
wildcard searches, and the ability to suspend indexing while on
battery.  Moreover, as of this release, the Beagle daemon and its
command-line tools no longer require gtk-sharp (only glib-sharp).
Many bugs have also been fixed, including issues searching for HTML
mails, case-sensitivity bugs when searching for certain properties,
problems opening files and emails containing certain Unicode
characters, and overaggressive optimizing of indexes.  We encourage
everyone to try out this release.


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

To download the 0.2.8 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

A Pluton sounds like a radioactive bread-based salad topping, but it's
not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluton_%28astronomy%29


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 supports many different file formats including OpenOffice
documents, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, HTML files, and many image,
audio and video formats.  Beagle can extract information from your
file system; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KMail emails; Evolution and
Thunderbird addressbooks; Evolution calendars; Gaim and Kopete instant
messenger conversations; feeds from several RSS aggregators; Tomboy
notes; Konqueror browsing history; system documentation; and many
others.  Beagle also indexes tags on your photos from F-Spot and
Digikam.

Beagle also provides Firefox and Epiphany extensions that index web
pages in real-time as the user visits them.

Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the prodigious Doug
Cutting.

Beagle includes a GTK-based graphical tool for searching the index
that the daemon creates.  This application doesn't query the index
directly; it passes the search terms to the daemon and the daemon
sends any matches back.  The user interface 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 requires:
* Mono 1.1.13.5 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* glib-sharp 2.3.90 or better (for the daemon and tools)
* gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better (for the UI and some backends)
* GMime 2.1.19
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better
* shared-mime-info

For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have:
* Mono 1.1.16 or better
* GMime 2.2.1
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 or 0.11.1
* libgsf 1.12.1 and gsf-sharp 0.6 or libgsf 1.14 and gsf-sharp 0.7
* 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-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.

And other optional dependencies:
http://beagle-project.org/Optional_Prerequisites


CHANGES SINCE 0.2.7
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* No longer require gtk-sharp for the core parts of the daemon and
  tools, only glib-sharp.  (Debajyoti Bera)
* Add support for wildcard searches.  (Joe Shaw)
* Monitor the battery status and stop the scheduler if the config
  option is set.  (Joe)
* Optimize an index no more often than once a day.  (Joe)
* Fix various case-sensitivity issues when searching against
  properties.  (Joe)
* If file attributes were previously stored in the Sqlite database but
  can now be set using extended attributes, do that and remove the old
  one.  (Bera)
* Add messages to retrieve specific daemon information rather than
  getting it all at once.  (Bera)
* Fix a crash in xdgmime in which null mime types were being added to
  the database.  (Bera)
* Better handle errors when hits are filtered by backends.  (Joe)
* Greatly improve error reporting throughout the code.  (Joe, Bera)
* Improve signal handling, especially immediately after daemon
  startup.  (Bera)
* Add a handler for SIGUSR1 to turn on the highest level of debugging
  while the daemon is running.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Added a Thunderbird backend (Pierre Östlund, Kevin Kubasik)
* When crawling the file system, index directories only one level down
  from the root before all others.  (Joe)
* Use more efficient indexable generators for the Gaim and indexing
  service backends, making startup much faster for people with
  thousands of IM logs or viewed web pages.  (Joe)
* Fix various bugs in parsing the Kopete buddy list.  (Pat Double)
* Add some sanity checks to the Evolution mail backend, checking for
  non-existent summary files.  (Joe)
* Fix a file descriptor leak in the KMail backend.  (Joe)

Filters:
* Correctly handle "emotes" in Gaim log files.  (Joe)
* Soft line breaks are correctly treated as whitespace in the
  OpenOffice filter.  (Bera)
* Index the name of individual sheets in an OpenOffice spreadsheet.
  (Bera)
* Don't index style nodes in OpenOffice filter.  (Bera)
* Don't try to index password-protected PowerPoint documents.  (Joe)
* Fix a 100% CPU issue with certain broken PowerPoint documents. (Joe)
* Index keywords from KDE .desktop files.  (Stephan Kulow, Joe)
* Added mime types for Matroska and OGM video files.  (Mario Manno)
* Added "camera-model" as a searchable property for JPEG files. (Bera)
* Added "genre" as a searchable property for music files.  (Joe)
* Fix the mime type for Ruby files.  (Wade Menard)

UI:
* Handle text/html message parts using the mail tile.  (Joe, Paddy
  Spencer, Rafał Próchniak)
* Fix a URI encoding issue that prevented files containing Unicode
  characters from being opened correctly.  (Joe)
* Fix presentation of number of results when there is only one page,
  so you don't see dumb things like "1-1 of 1".  (Joe)
* Fix UTC date issues and calculating spans of time so that the dates
  displayed are more accurate.  (Joe)
* Fix amusing bug where you could use the scroll wheel to scroll
  through the different pages at startup.  (Joe)
* Display the message's folder in the mail tile.  (Joe)
* Display "(unknown)" if we can't figure out who we're speaking to in
  the IM log tile.  (Joe)

Bindings:
* Fix an issue where beagle_util_daemon_is_running() wouldn't work
  with NFS home directories.  (Joe)

Tools:
* Make the help button in beagle-settings point to the right Wiki
  page.  (Kevin)

Translations:
* Added Hindi translation.  (Guntupalli Karunakar)
* Added Latvian translation.  (Raivis Dejus)
* Added Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) translation.  (Chao-Hsiung
  Liao)
* Updated Catalan translation.  (Jordi Mas)
* Updated Czech translation.  (Jakub Friedl)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Tino Meinen)
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated French translation.  (Guillaume Ayoub)
* Updated Hungarian translation.  (Gabor Kelemen)
* Updated Italian translation.  (Luca Ferretti)
* Updated Japanese translation.  (Takeshi Aihana)
* Updated Korean translation.  (Young-Ho Cha)
* Updated Lithuanian translation.  (Žygimantas Beručka)
* Updated Norwegian bokmål translation.  (Kjartan Maraas)
* Updated Russian translation.  (Valek Filippov)
* Updated Spanish translation.  (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)
* Updated Swedish translation.  (Daniel Nylander)
* Updated Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation.  (Chao-Hsiung Liao)

Everything Else:
* Fix Firefox extension to not match only partial subdomains.  (Kevin)
* Fix references to Best in the Firefox extension.  (Kevin)
* Fix compile errors with newer gtk-sharp versions.  (Kevin)
* Don't set MONO_GAC_PREFIX in any wrapper scripts; this is now the
  responsibility of the user.  (Joe)
* Various other fixes (Lukas Lipka, Kevin, Bera, Joe)


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

We still use a bit too much memory.  We are working on it.

Certain extremely large documents can temporarily degrade your
system's performance while they are being indexed.

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.

Certain files can crash the underlying libraries Beagle uses to
extract metadata.  This has been observed in MS Word and JPG files.
If you encounter such a crash, please report it to the upstream
developer of those libraries (wv1 and libexif for the above, respectively).

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.


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--
Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik
http://kubasik.net/blog
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