ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.17

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.17.  This is a bug
fix release.


THE SHORT OF IT
---------------

To download the 0.2.17 release or learn more about Beagle, visit
the Beagle web page:

   http://beagle-project.org


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------

Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and
unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time.  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.
* Web pages are indexed as you view them (with a browser extension).

Beagle supports many different data sources and file formats.  For a
complete listing, visit:

   http://beagle-project.org/Supported_Filetypes

Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the Apache project and the
prodigious Doug Cutting, ported to .NET by George Aroush.

Beagle includes an optional GNOME-based graphical tool for searching
its indexes.

To learn more about Beagle, visit:

   http://beagle-project.org/About


DEPENDENCY HECK
---------------

The Beagle daemon requires at least:
* Mono 1.1.13.5
* glib-sharp 2.4.0
* GMime 2.2.0
* libexif 0.5.7
* shared-mime-info
* sqlite 2.x or 3.3.1

The GNOME user interface requires:
* gtk-sharp 2.4.0
* gnome-sharp 2.4.0

To support all of Beagle's features and file formats, you should
also have:
* Mono 1.2.2 or better
* Firefox 1.5 or Epiphany
* Evolution-sharp 0.11.1 for Evolution Data Server 1.4 or 1.6,
 or 0.12.2 for EDS 1.8 or 1.9.
* libgsf 1.14.1
* gsf-sharp 0.8.1 from
 http://primates.ximian.com/~joe/gsf-sharp-0.8.1.tar.gz
* wv1 1.2.4
* pdfinfo and pdftotext from xpdf
* MPlayer or Totem 2.17.1
* Galago 0.5.x
* Linux kernel 2.6.13 with inotify


NOTABLE CHANGES BETWEEN 0.2.16 AND 0.2.16.3
-------------------------------------------

* When extracting files from archives, save the temporary files with
 the appropriate file extensions (rather than .tmp) so that
 extension-based MIME type detection works correctly.

* Handle phrase queries that contained stop words much better.
 For example, previously "no dice" would return no hits.

* Make the archive filter much more robust. [bgo #415056, bnc #244490
 and #228718]

* Add --disable-on-battery to beagle-build-index, add support for
 it in beagle-crawl-system, and enable it for the documentation
 index, since it takes a while to build. [bgo #383789]

* Add --disable-text-cache to the Beagle daemon, to disable storing of
 text for snippets.  This saves substantial amounts of disk space at
 the expense of showing snippets in the UI.

* Fix a bug in which deleted files weren't removed from the text cache
 properly.

* Fix prohibited date queries (ie, -date:20070505) in most cases.

* Fix an infinite loop on certain SVG files. [bgo #407564]

* Fix an infinite loop on some truncated JPEG files. [bgo #405372]

* Limit PDF tools to 100 megs mapped memory. [bgo #335461]

* Add more well-known locations for Docbook files, since their MIME
 type often cannot be determined beyond generic XML types.

* Use the TOMBOY_HOME environment variable if available. [bgo #332102]

* Fix the CHM filter. [bgo #408047]

* Fix opening of Konversation hits in beagle-search. [bgo #408101]

* Shut down the daemon sooner if requested in the middle of a large
 batch of files being indexed.

* Many other minor filter and backend fixes.


NOTABLE CHANGES BETWEEN 0.2.16.3 AND 0.2.17
-------------------------------------------

* Redirect low-level stdout and stderr to the log file, rather than
 just .Net streams so that Mono crashes are logged and saved
 somewhere useful.

* Lower CPU priority in the Beagle daemon, for instances where we get
 a little CPU hungry.

* Add a new index verification process if stale lockfiles are left
 behind for whatever reason (usually an index helper crash).  The
 process is rather CPU intensive, but overall will be less painful
 than purging the index and reindexing everything.

* Watch the X connection more closely, fixing a bug in which the
 daemon wouldn't exit when the user logged out if it didn't have any
 work to do.

* Always start the daemon with --replace, so that no more than one
 copy is running per user.

* Speed up the returning of results by about 10%.

* Remove separate crawling and indexing threads from
 beagle-build-index, causing it to be slightly faster and use a lot
 less memory.

* Speed up beagle-index-info by returning cached document counts, and
 not starting up a helper process to get them.

* Fix an infinite loop problem with empty OpenOffice documents. [bgo
 #427256, #435694]

* Better handle PDF files which spew tons of warnings with
 pdfinfo. [bgo #425150]

* Display the first Nautilus emblem on file results, and fix an
 uncommon memory leak in the beagle-search UI.

* Remove the Mono --debug argument from beagle-search, saving about 2
 megs RSS and making startup faster.  Also remove it from things like
 beagle-build-index.

* Fix a bug in which mail attachments which didn't have a file name
 weren't being displayed in the UI.

* Fix bugs in counting the total number of results in the UI.

* Fix a crash caused by empty buddy icons. [Launchpad #93064]

* Fix a crash caused by empty icons from Liferea. [bgo #428336]

* Fix an exception caused by Evolution IMAP folders with commas in
 their names. [bgo #432417, lp #108957]

* Redirect MS Word extractor script output to stderr so that it
 doesn't interfere with the indexing process.

* Fix some file modification date handling issues in the daemon.

* Exit the beagle-crawl-system cronjob if beagle-build-index doesn't
 exist. [bgo #370943]

* Always set the process name in beagle-extract-content.

* Add application/xhtml+xml as a MIME type for the HTML filter.

* Sync our copy of xdgmime with the upstream GTK+ version.

* Translations:

 - Arabic               (Djihed Afifi)
 - Brazilian Portuguese (Igor Pires Soares)
 - British English      (David Lodge)
 - Czech                (Jakub Friedl)
 - Dzongkha             (Pema Geyleg)
 - Finnish              (Ilkka Tuohela)
 - French               (Guillaume Ayoub, Stéphane Raimbault,
			  Christophe Bliard, Claude Paroz)
 - Galician             (Ignacio Casal Quinteiro)
 - Hungarian            (Gabor Kelemen)
 - Japanese             (Takeshi Aihana)
 - Macedonian           (Jovan Naumovski)
 - Norwegian bokmål     (Kjartan Maraas)
 - Simplified Chinese   (Funda Wang)
 - Spanisn              (Roberto Majadas, Jorge Gonzalez)
 - Swedish              (Daniel Nylander)

Contributors to this release: Joe Shaw, Debajyoti Bera, Jose Carlos
Garcia Sogo, Alexander Macdonald.

Roughly 43 GNOME Bugzilla bugs were fixed between 0.2.16 and 0.2.17:
http://tinyurl.com/3d8aqx

Full set of changes:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_2_17/ChangeLog


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

The Thunderbird backend is memory hungry and buggy.  It is now disabled by
default, but can be reenabled by passing in --enable-thunderbird to
configure.

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.

At this point in development, we cannot commit to stable APIs or file
formats.  You will almost certainly need to reindex your data at some
point in the future.