ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.12

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.12.  This version
continues our optimization work, and includes memory reductions at
startup of roughly 40%.


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

To download the 0.2.12 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

The Adams-On�Treaty resolved a border dispute between the US and
Spain in 1819:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams-On%C3%ADs_Treaty


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
 
Beagle is a desktop-independent service for indexing and searching
your data.

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,
Thunderbird, and KAddressbook addressbooks; Evolution calendars; Gaim
and Kopete instant messenger conversations; feeds from several RSS
aggregators; Tomboy, KNotes, and Labyrinth notes; Konqueror browsing
history; system documentation; and more.  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 an optional GNOME-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 2.4.0 or better (for the daemon and tools)
* gtk-sharp 2.4.0 or better (for the UI and some backends)
* GMime 2.2.0
* 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
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 or 0.11.1
* libgsf 1.14.1 and gsf-sharp 0.8.1 from
  http://primates.ximian.com/~joe/gsf-sharp-0.8.1.tar.gz
* Galago 0.5.x
* 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 0.2.11
--------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Drastically reduce memory usage of beagled and beagled-index-helper
  at startup by changing how certain pluggable components are
  detected.  Filter and backend authors, see IMPORTANT NOTE below.
  (Joe Shaw, Debojyoti Bera, Kevin Kubasik)
* Don't run Beagle in Mono with the --debug flag unless --mono-debug
  is passed into beagled.  This saves memory and fixes leaks.  (Joe)
* Tokenize emails and hostnames when indexing.  (Bera)
* Add back in Hangul Jamo support to Lucene, which was lost in our
  upgrade to 1.9.1.  (Young-Ho Cha)
* If we get an exception handling a message, catch it and wrap it in
  an ErrorResponse to send to the client.  (Joe)
* Fix a bug in non-Lucene backends when seeing whether or not it's
  indexing.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Fix the Thunderbird backend to index the "Local Folders" account.
  (Pierre �tlund)
* Add Konqueror bookmark backend.  (Bera)
* Generate KAddressbook and KNotes URIs in correct case.  (Bera)
* Store the Liferea feed icon as a property.  (Max Wiehle)
* Fix an exception on non-note files in the Tomboy directory.  (Joe)
* Stop doing unnecessary extra work in the KAddressbook and KNotes
  backends.  (Bera)
* Don't deal with email addresses separately in various backend and
  filters, since they are handled by the tokenizer now.  (Bera)

Tools:
* Add --disable-directories to beagle-build-index so that directories
  themselves aren't indexed.  (Joe)
* Set the default applications and documentation crawl rules to use
  --disable-directories.  (Joe)

Translations:
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated Italian translation.  (Luca Ferretti)
* Updated Japanese translation.  (Takeshi Aihana)

Everything else:
* Bump the Firefox extension version number to indicate that it has
  Firefox 2.0 support.  (Joe)
* Don't hardcode mcs as the C# compiler.  (Joe)
* Remove a large number of compile warnings that recent Mono versions
  started to expose.  (Bera)


IMPORTANT NOTE FOR FILTER AND BACKEND AUTHORS
---------------------------------------------

As a result of ongoing work to reduce Beagle's overall memory usage,
this version of Beagle includes changes to the way Filters, Backends,
and extensions to Beagle's messaging system (usually implemented by
backends) are loaded.

It's is now necessary to explicitly register these object types.  To
do this, you need to use assembly-scoped attributes to register the
classes.  To see examples on how to do this, check out how Beagle
registers its own classes here:

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/beagle/beagled/AssemblyInfo.cs
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/beagle/Filters/AssemblyInfo.cs


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

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

In particular, the Thunderbird backend can take very large amounts of
memory if you have large mailboxes.  This issue is being addressed.

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

There are some race conditions that can occur with certain combinations of
file system operations.  In very rare 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.