Re: simple questions

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On 4/21/07, Nagyon Almos <b17 freemail hu> wrote:
>   1) I would like to search in some directories outside
> my home in which I dont have write permission.
> I added those directories with AddRoot.
> Beagle seems to ignore those files.
> Can I make beagle to index them right now, if yes, then how?

I don't think there's any way to do it immediately; IIRC they will be
processed after the first root (probably your home directory) is
crawled.

I'll double check on this and look into changing the behavior.  I seem
to remember the reason why it isn't processed until the end is to
avoid unnecessary disk thrash.  Since the added roots are often on the
same hard drive but in a different partition, crawling them
simultaneously causes a lot of disk seeks and hits the page cache
pretty hard.

> Or does beagle need write permissions (for acls or anything)?

It doesn't need write permissions, although they do provide a
performance benefit (because of Beagle's use of extended attributes).

>   2) I am trying to make some of my own filters hence
> I would like to specify the extensions (in the filter xml file)
> with egrep-style regular expressions. Is it possible?

Do you mean in the external-filters.xml file?  Extensions are matched
exactly there, so you'll have to provide multiple extensions to match;
there's no regex matching there.

>   3) Does anyone have any experience with Thunderbird,
> Dovecot (maildir) and Beagle? I tried to look through
> the source but it is well beyond my programming knowledge.

There is a Thunderbird backend for Beagle, but it's disabled by
default due to some issues with its memory consumption.  Can you give
a little more detail on your setup?

>   4) This python/perl is needed because
> some of my e-mails are html-entity, quoted-printable, 8-bit,
> iso-8859-2, utf-8  encoded and so on.
> I guess this is not a problem for Beagle at all, ie it can search
> in any e-mail no mattter how it is encoded.

It should be able to handle these.  Beagle uses the GMime library to
handle emails, so it should do any encoding conversions itself.

> What about the attached files?

I don't see any files attached?  Or do you mean generically files
attached to emails?  Beagle indexes those.

Joe