Re: Beagle hackfest at GNOME Summit

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

> We had a hackfest at the GNOME Summit in Boston this past weekend.
>
> Here's a quick rundown of the things people decided to work on:
>
>         * Me - Working on updating the indexer to better handle support
>         of user-provided metadata.  Originally my plan was to store
>         metadata in an sqlite database and use Lucene for text search,
>         but having worked on the implementation since the summit this
>         doesn't look very feasible.  More investigation on the Lucene
>         side needs to be done.
>
>         * Fredrik Hedberg - Work on merging the two Google Summer of
>         Code projects to add networking support to Beagle.  One half of
>         the project was the main search support, which is done over
>         HTTP, and the second half is Avahi support so that other Beagle
>         servers around you are autodetected.
>
>         * Aaron Bockover and Daniel Drake - Moving our audio filters
>         over to using taglib-sharp instead of entagged-sharp, which is
>         now deprecated and unmaintained.  I think the work here is now
>         mostly done, but it's not in CVS yet.
>
>         * Gabriel Burt - Looked into increased integration of Beagle and
>         F-Spot.  Not sure what the result of this was.
>
>         * Dan Winship - As a broader goal desktop goal, decided to look
>         into moving Beagle to Cmake and learn its strengths and
>         weaknesses.  It sounds like there are a lot of weaknesses, at
>         least within using it in GNOME.
>
>         * Robert Love - Hanger on; spell checker; incorrectly
>         attributing typos to me.
>
> Later, Bastien Nocera talked to me about creating a video filter based
> on Totem.  He implemented it, and it's now waiting on my lazy ass to
> commit it: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=361047

Great. I showed up at the Summit on Monday for a few hours (my first 
hacker/developer conference :-)). Inspite of my huge plan list for beagle, I 
was working on something simple - backend(s) for KAddressbook and KNotes 
using the ICal parser Fredrik checked in recently. Recently support to query 
KAddressBook was address in Kerry (the kde beagle search frontend) but using 
direct queries to KAddressBook api. Hopefully kerry will switch to beagle 
after I am done with the backends.

I have started thinking about making beagle robust against crashes while 
indexing. And there might be possible ways to stop (or reduce) deletion of 
beagle indexes after every crash - I am in touch with Joe on that. It will 
depend on some low-level implementation detail about Lucene and will depend 
on the solution of the user-metadata problem.

- dBera

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