Re: State of the Pooch

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi,
	A few fill in the blanks from my side:

> * Generics and .NET 2.0
>
...
>         move to generics will also help reduce our memory usage.  In

The memory reduction and speed improvement are _huge_. I decided to switch CVS 
to generics a couple of week ago but some runtime crashes during my testing 
with 1.1.18 stopped me. Unfortunately, 1.2 is not suitable for the extended 
attribute problem Joe mentioned in an earlier problem. But the switch is 
happening soon.

> * Showing status on the state of the index

The infrastructure is mostly there. One of the reasons I feel none of the 
backend authors (ahem) use it because none of the known UIs actually show 
this information. GUI people please figure out how to inform the user about 
indexing and index status and the backends will get straightened out.

> * Handling crashes in the index helper better.

This is a killer. Its on my cards once unified index lands. Since there wont 
be a separate index for each backend, a single bad file could potentially 
ruin data from other backends. The webbrowser backends e.g. wont be able to 
recreate the index if purged. They need to be in a separate index.

> * Removable media
>
>         Beagle needs to support indexing of data on removable media.
>         There isn't any support for this right now.  I don't really have
>         in-depth details about this, but it's on the radar and (sadly)
>         pretty far down on the TODO.

I started working on it and its lying 50% completed in my local tree. If 
anyone is interested, I can transfer the code and/or provide help.

> * Thunderbird memory usage
>
>         The Thunderbird backend is a bit of a hog right now.  This is:
>
>                 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355549
>
>         Kevin has been doing some work on this, but we really need
>         people to take a look at this.  I know that this backend has
>         been disabled by default in Fedora Core 6.

I suggested some potential improvements to Kevin. The initial improvement is 
already in CVS. While a streaming Mork parser would be the best way to fix 
this, I have different plans to tame it. Working on it.

> * The return of D-Bus
Yup. D-Bus would be good. For KDE4 ;-).

> I think that's it!  There is always work to be done in supporting new
> file formats through filters and data sources through backends, as well
> as improving our documentation on the Wiki.  We've done a great job

Joe,
Can we put the libbeagle documentation on the wiki ? Like the glib docs. For 
some reason I cant generate the documentation on my machine and having an 
updated API documentation on the web will make people interested in using the 
API. I can do it, but how do I add a bunch of html pages to the wiki as-is ?

- dBera

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------
Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user