ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.5

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.5.

Version 0.2.4 shipped with a broken HTML filter, which meant that web
pages that were indexed because of the Firefox extension couldn't be
searched.  This release fixes that.  Also fixed is a compilation error
triggered by the more strict Mono 1.1.14 C# compiler.  This version is
also the first to correctly handle a broken X connection, meaning
Beagle will now shut down cleanly when you log out if you started it 
at login.


OUR MANY URLS
-------------

To download the 0.2.5 tarball or learn more, visit the Beagle wiki at:
http://www.beagle-project.org

The latest gossip is available at:
http://www.planetbeagle.org

Nat Friedman made some cool movies that demonstrate Beagle in action:
http://nat.org/demos

We still talk about Beagle on the dashboard-hackers mailing list:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers

April is International Guitar Month:
http://www.discoverguitar.com/home.html


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
 
Beagle is a tool for indexing and searching your data.  Beagle is improving
rapidly on many fronts, and should work well enough for everyday use.
 
The Beagle daemon transparently monitors your data and updates the index
to reflect any changes.  On an inotify-enabled system, these updates happen
more-or-less in real time.  So 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.

Beagle supports many different file formats including OpenOffice
documents, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, HTML files, and many image
and audio formats.  Beagle can extract information from your file
system, Evolution and KMail mailboxes, Evolution calendars and
addressbooks, Gaim and Kopete instant messenger conversations, several
RSS aggregators, Tomboy notes, system documentation, and many others.

Beagle also provides Firefox and Epiphany extensions that index web
pages in real-time as the user visits them.

Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the prodigious Doug
Cutting.

Beagle includes a GTK-based graphical tool for searching the index
that the daemon creates.  This application doesn't query the index
directly; it passes the search terms to the daemon and the daemon
sends any matches back.  The user interface then renders the results
and allows you to perform useful actions on the matching objects.

Indexing your data requires a fair amount of computing power, but the Beagle
daemon tries to be as unobtrusive as possible.  It contains a scheduler that
works to prioritize tasks and control CPU usage, based on whether or not
you are actively using your workstation.


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

Beagle requires:
* Mono 1.1.10 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better
* GMime 2.1.19
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better
* shared-mime-info

For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have:
* Mono 1.1.13.5
* GMime 2.2.1
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2
* libgsf 1.12.1 and gsf-sharp 0.6
* Either wv 1.2.0, or a *patched* wv 1.0.3 --- the patch is available from
  http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/beagle/wv-libole2-readonly.patch
* An inotify-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.

And other optional dependencies:
http://beagle-project.org/Optional_Prerequisites


CHANGES SINCE 0.2.4
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Shut the daemon down cleanly on a broken X connection, since we
  can't gracefully recover from it.  (Joe Shaw)
* Unset the DISPLAY variable in the index helper, since it should
  never get an X connection.  (Joe)
* Enabled and disabled backends can now be saved as part of the
  configuration, through the beagle-config tool.  (D Bera)
* Add a new --backends command-line that gives the user more control
  over what backends are started, given the new configuration.  The
  --allow-backend and --deny-backend options are now deprecated.
  (Bera)
* Don't allow the daemon to be run from sudo, since its default
  configuration causes broken permissions in ~/.beagle and ~/.wapi.
  (Joe)
* Make sure HOME or BEAGLE_HOME is set before starting the daemon.
  (Joe)
* Change to using glib's g_spawn to launch programs, rather than
  .Net's own internal Process class.  (Joe)
* If we can't set the IO priority class to idle, at least set the
  priority to the lowest in our current class.  (Joe)
* Use the newner kernel syscall interface for gettid().  (LaMont
  Jones)

Backends:
* Add a bunch of checks to the file system backend to help deal with
  rapid creation and deletion of files and directories.  (Joe)
* Enable snippets for KMail maildir emails.  (Bera)
* Extract text more correctly from Tomboy notes.  (Bera)
* Fix a crash in the EvolutionDataServer backend when new sources are
  added for indexing.  (Joe)

Filters:
* Fix a logical error in the HTML filter which prevented it from
  working properly in 0.2.4.  (Joe)
* Fix compilation of FilterTiff.cs with Mono 1.1.14.  (Bera)
* Add audio/x-vorbis+ogg as a supported MIME type for the music
  filter.  (Joe)
* Open OLE filters (like MS Word) with libgsf's stdio interface rather
  than mmap, so that changes on disk don't corrupt the stream as it's
  being filtered.  (Joe)

UI:
* Reset a finished query so that we don't crash.  (Lukas Lipka)
* Add Ctrl-L as an alternate keybinding to focus the search entry.
  (Dan Winship)
* Don't steal the focus from the search entry if you do a search
  activated by timeout after a search activated by pressing enter.
  (Dan)
* Make sure tiles are redrawn when you expand or contract the group.
  (Dan)
* If an icon theme only has icons that are much larger than what is
  asked for, scale them down to the appropriate size.  (Joe)

Tools:
* Explicitly set our .wapi dir in beagle-crawl-system to a temporary
  directory, so that it works without a home directory.  (Bera)
* Fix beagle-crawl-system to work when the user doesn't have a
  default shell.  (Bera)
* Add --list-backends and --list-static-indexes options to
  beagle-info.  (Bera, Joe)
* If we don't match a filter using beagle-extract-content, don't
  assume it's plain text.  (Joe)
* Display correct values for flags in beagle-dump-index.  (Bera)
* Don't install the beagle-crawl-system cronjob into libexec.  (Joe)

Bindings:
* Use pyexecdir instead of pythondir for installing the python
  module.  (Gentoo)

Translations:
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated Hungarian translation.  (Gabor Kelemen, Stanislav Brabec)
* Updated Japanese translation.  (Takeshi AIHANA)
* Updated Swedish translation.  (Daniel Nylander)


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

Yes, we know we use too much memory.  We are working on it.

Certain extremely large documents can temporarily degrade your
system's performance while they are being indexed.

The file system is now much more robust than ever before.  However, there
are still race conditions that can occur with certain combinations of
file system operations.  In some cases it might be necessary to stop and
restart the daemon.

The CHM filter has been disabled because the HTML filter it is based
upon has changed, and it has not been updated.

The web services architecture has been deprecated and is no longer
built.  It has some design issues and is currently unmaintained.

At this point in development, we cannot commit to stable APIs or file formats.
You will almost certainly need to delete your indexes and start again at some
point in the future.