ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.1

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.1.

This version is primarily a bug fix release.  The widespread exposure
of our new user interface helped us uncover a handfull of bugs which are
fixed in this release.

This version also includes additional work to reduce our memory
footprint.


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

To download the 0.2.1 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

Vostok, Antarctica boasts a balmy summertime average temperature of
-32.1C, and has the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth at
-89.2C:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok%2C_Antarctica


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 also provides Firefox and Epiphany extensions that allow web pages
to be indexed 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 has many dependencies, and thus can be difficult to compile.
It 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
* 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 0.24-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.


CHANGES SINCE 0.2.0
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Split the UI elements from the non-UI elements.  (D Bera, Joe Shaw)
* Reenable Sqlite 3 support, but only if you have 3.3.1 or
  newer.  (Joe)
* Purge Sqlite databases if the major versions mismatch.  (Joe)
* Fix an unlikely exception when shutting the daemon down in the
  middle of its startup process.  (Joe)
* Don't create a user text cache if we dealing only with static
  querables.  (Bera)
* Make the text cache only readable by the user.  (Joe)
* Remove the non-working non-inotify file system watcher.  (Joe)
* Add Hangul support to Lucene.  (dittos gmail com, Young-Ho Cha)
* Use locale-independent lower casing in the Sqlite code; fixes a
  problem particularly with Turkish.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Rename the Evolution mail backend from "Mail" to
  "EvolutionMail". (Joe)
* Move the Evolution mail backend into an external assembly with the
  Evolution Data Server backend.  (Joe)
* Filter out certain files when walking Evolution IMAP directories,
  reducing time and memory usage.  (Joe)
* Decode the subject on Evolution IMAP messages.  (Joe)
* Store flags as mutable properties in the Evolution mail index,
  speeding up reindexing mail.  (Joe)
* Fix the Konqueror backend to correctly report current indexing
  status.  (Bera)

Filters:
* Add a filter for TIFF files.  (Larry Ewing)

UI/Tools:
* Fix sorting to work during live queries.  (Lukas Lipka)
* Fix a crash when old queries had updated after the user had started
  a new one.  (Lukas, Joe)
* Fix the image tile to still work even if an image file lacks an
  extension.  (Lukas)
* Don't display a "..." snippet while loading IM snippets.  (Lukas)
* Fix a bug where markup was being displayed in some tile snippets
  instead of correctly bolding the text.  (Lukas)
* Fix a bug where we weren't caching the snippet for IM tiles. (Lukas)
* Fix the background color on the viewport in the main pane.  (Dan Winship)
* Specify full library names in the tray icon so we don't depend on
  devel packages.  (Dan)
* Many 64 bit fixes to the notification area icon.  (Dan)
* Remove a bunch of unused images from the image assembly.  (Joe)
* Remove the accidentally used GPL spinner code from Epiphany and
  replace it with a managed, MIT-licensed replacement.  (Dan)
* Fix the beagle-search desktop file to have the right icon.  (Joe)
* Install the icon into the system pixmaps directory.  (Joe)
* Update the IM log viewer to use the new icon.  (Joe)
* Add some warning text to beagle-build-index about the target
  path.  (Joe)

Translations:
* Added Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) translation.  (Chao-Hsiung Liao)
* Updated Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation.  (Chao-Hsiung Liao)
* Updated German translation.  (Hendrik Brandt)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Tino Meinen)
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated Catalan translation.  (Jordi Mas i Hernandez)
* Updated Danish translation.  (Lasse Bang Mikkelsen)
* Updated Canadian English translation.  (Adam Weinberger)
* Updated Hungarian translation.  (Gabor Kelemen)
* Updated Greek translation.  (Nikos Charonitakis)

Everything Else:
* Add shared-mime-info as a required dependency.  (Joe)


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

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

Extreme spikes in memory usage have been observed in some cases.
Certain extremely large documents can temporarily degrade your
system's performance while they are being indexed.  In most of these
cases, the memory is reclaimed by the system relatively quickly after
the document is 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.