querying over network (from SoC 2006)

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hey folks,
	Better late than never :-D. Alexis' work on network beagle (GSoC ... ahem, 
2006) is now available in beagle svn. The code is largely untested; it 
probably worked during last summer, it probably even works now but so much 
has changed in between that its hard to say everything works without enough 
testing. So instead of the trunk, it is available in the 
beagle-cutting-edge-branch (r3797). To make life easier, just
"svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_OVER_NETWORK/";

Once/if it gets enough testing, it can be merged to the trunk. I remember 
quite a few emails in the list asking how to query beagle over the network; 
some of you might still be interested I hope :)

Usage: The interface is kind of rudimentary right now. Only the files backend 
sends results over network. Querying over network is only possible using the 
CLI beagle-query. beagled runs in port 4000. No GUI support for remote 
querying or specifying remote nodes. All of these are simpler changes. If 
people show interest, they will be duly added. (Alexis, I believe, also had 
GUI code in his project. I am not a GUI person so I left that part of the 
code out. Feel free to tinker with the GUI support. Alexis' tarball is linked 
somewhere in the web).

1) Start beagled with "--networked" on machine-A
2) On machine-B, use "beagle-config networking AddNeighborhoodBeagleNode 
hostname:portnumber" to add the machine-A (use portnumber = 4000)
3) On machine-B, run "beagle-query --local no --remote yes <search_terms>" to 
search remote beagle.
4) Cross your fingers and hope the roof does not crash.

You can test on the same machine too ... use 127.0.0.1 as the hostname. I 
suggest running beagled with "--fg --debug" to catch some verbose debug 
messages.

Any bugs, please reply here or send me an email (replying to the list will 
help others with similar issue).

Ahh... one last thing. The cutting-edge-branch has code from 0.2.16, so some 
of the recent improvements in 0.2.16.* and 0.2.17 is not available there. In 
case you wondered.

Alexis, thanks!

- dBera

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