test beagle-0.3 pre-release

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Finally! 0.3 seems one step closer now. I made pre-release tarballs for beagle 
and libbeagle. You can get them from here:

http://kubasik.net/beagle/beagle-0.3.0.tar.gz
http://kubasik.net/beagle/libbeagle-1.0.tar.gz

We would really appreciate if some of you could try this and let us know about 
any stopper bugs. If people can provide packages for the common 
distributions, then it might be easier for a lot of other people to test. Note 
that libbeagle is now distributed separately. Also the earlier libbeagle-0.0 
will not work with beagle-0.3. Thanks in advance.

Nearly every codepath underwent some change so just run it the usual way you 
do. Also this release has API and ABI changes from the 0.2.x 
series. If you are running any of the 0.2.x versions, everything should be 
automatically upgraded. If you are running trunk, you might want to erase 
~/.beagle.

Some of the new features that could get some testing,
- beagle-settings and beagle-config. Besides there are now global 
configuration files at /etc/beagle/config-files/
- web interface (WebInterface option has to be enabled; either use 
beagle-settings or "beagle-config Networking WebInterface true") at 
http://localhost:4000/ The webinterface is minimal but usable (and useful 
too). We are working on it to add standard features to it. See 
web-interface->help for how to open the result links
- New tex filter, opera webhistory backend. ... the music filter should now 
index lot more tags and the image filter should now index several iptc tags 
too. Firefox extension to index firefox webhistory. Less troublesome 
Thunderbird extension. Nautilus metadata is also indexed.
- beagle-search got some UI touches as well. I know some of you have comments 
about some design issues in the UI but for the time being, please focus on 
crashes/incorrect data. BTW, there is a bugzilla bug if you want to comment 
on the UI design of beagle-search.
- Some additions to query syntax
- network search (I am not sure how stable this is but from my experience with 
the webinterface this should work too)
- the usual suspects - indexing some file takes 100% cpu for a long time, 
beagled/index-helper not killed after session logout, stale temporary files 
in ~/tmp etc. That reminds me, some OpenSuSE 10.3 users reported that certain 
emails hang gmime (basically means those emails wont be indexed and 
indexhelper will hang on that file) - 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=485005

Things to keep in mind:
- the python and libbeagle apps out there _might_ not work (if they dont just 
work, then they need some renaming and tweaking). Specifically, kerry works 
(you have to tweak the build scripts to get it built with libbeagle-1.0). But 
the settings-gui with kerry and beagle-kontrol (that comes with kbeaglebar) 
should not be used. They use the old style config files.
- I checked the latest shared-mime-info that beagle uses to detect mimetypes 
of files. The magic for the office types (doc/ppt/xls) are incomplete; so 
several valid office files will probably be misrecognised and ignored.
- If you have a torrent download directory, its best to add it as an excluded 
subdirectory; some torrent clients continuously write/close the file as they 
receive data causing reindexing of the same file over and over.
- Enabling avahi during ./configure will cause beagle to publish its search 
service via avahi and those machines can be searched remotely. Avahi is 
disabled by default because some of use experienced stability problems with 
avahi-sharp.

Thats all for now. Please test the above tarballs and let us know if anything 
is seriously wrong. If things go smooth, we expect to get 0.3 out in about a 
week from now.

Thanks in advance for your co-operation,
- dBera

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