ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.2

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.2.

This is a bug fix release.  Since 0.2.1, roughly 50 bugzilla bugs have
been fixed.  In particular, a large number of user interface and
behavioral bugs in our new UI, beagle-search, have been fixed.  As you
will see in the changelog below, this is our most stable release ever.


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

To download the 0.2.2 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

Tug of war was an Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war


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 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 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-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.


CHANGES SINCE 0.2.1
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Fix an access violation crash when opening snippets on large
  documents.  (Joe Shaw)
* Update our internal sqlite bindings to include many upstream fixes.
  (Daniel Drake, Joe)
* Fix a crash in the sqlite code on 64-bit machines.  (Joe)
* Fix a nasty bug in which certain items with non-file URIs weren't
  being indexed at all.  (Joe, D Bera)
* Fix a bug in which temp files weren't being cleaned up if a document
  wasn't indexed.  (Joe)
* Exit the daemon with error code 1 if it completely fails to run.
  (Joe)
* Fix a bug in libbeagle in which some asynchronous requests would
  never return.  (Joe)
* Bump up priorities of child indexable tasks so that they don't queue
  up for a long time when the daemon is very busy.  (Joe)
* Fix an occasional but harmless exception on startup, and don't
  unnecessarily create BeagleConsole log files.  (Joe)
* Add keyword mappings for querying image comments and tags.  (Bera)
* Query the screensaver X extension before using it.  (Joe)
* Exit with an error if an unknown argument is passed into beagled.
  (Likas Lipka)

Backends:
* Fix the file system backend so that you can now index the root
  directory.  (Joe)
* Index publisher/channel title information from RSS feeds.  (Bera)
* Fix a leak in the KMail backend.  (Joe)
* Fix a useless cache that was leaking memory in the file system
  backend.  (Joe)
* Handle negative date values in the Liferea backend.  (Joe)
* Use the sent date when timestamping Evolution IMAP messages.  (Joe)
* Fix an exception with Evolution mails that used labels.  (Joe)
* Support new gaim 2.0 log files.  (Joe)
* Add checks to the Evolution Data Server backend so that having an
  unsupported e-d-s doesn't kill the daemon.  (Joe)
* Allow loading of backends from BEAGLE_BACKEND_PATH environment
  variable.  (Joe)

Filters:
* Extract tags and comments from images with Digikam metadata.  (Bera)
* Don't pass in the document's title from the Firefox extension, since
  it will be extracted in the HTML filter.  (Bera)
* Pass encoding/charset information from the Firefox extension to the
  HTML filter so that documents that specify it in HTTP headers and not
  the HTML are indexed correctly.  (Joe)
* Catch exceptions stemming from sqlite version mismatches when
  opening the F-Spot database.  (Joe)

UI/Tools:
* Fix colors and theming for many themes in beagle-search, including
  gtk-qt, Crux, and others.  (Dan Winship)
* Fix a crash when the spinner icon isn't available.  (Dan)
* Improve the UI when displaying many matches at once.  (Dan)
* Added a Tomboy note tile.  (Joe)
* Added a calendar tile.  (Dan)
* If there is only a single category of matches, start out in "Show
  More" mode.  (Dan)
* Don't display mail attachments as blank mail tiles.  (Dan)
* Allow results to be sorted by title, timestamp, and score.  (Dan)
* Fix thumbnailing in beagle-search, and make it asynchronous so that
  it doesn't block the UI.  (Dan)
* Fix a bug in which tiles would be unselected if a tile was resized
  or re-sorted.  (Dan)
* Fix a bug in which focus was lost if the user resized the details
  pane.  (Dan)
* Don't hide the details pane if the user clicks somewhere that isn't
  a tile.  (Dan)
* Hide the details pane when starting a new search.  (Dan)
* Hide the details pane if the selected hit disappears.  (Dan)
* Don't automatically focus the search results if the search happened
  because of a timeout.  (Dan)
* Display the full path to image files.  (Lukas)
* Don't display blank titles for files with empty title fields.  (Lukas)
* Make the generated thumbnails bigger in the details pane.  (Lukas)
* Load the buddy icon for the IM details pane.  (Lukas)
* Added support to beagle-search for the hide/show keybinding in icon
  mode.  (Joe)
* Added a page to tell root users that Beagle cannot be used as root.
  (Joe)
* Make the creation of tiles easier by sharing much of the details
  code between them.  (Dan)
* Fix a problem in which the background of the tray icon wasn't
  transparent on KDE panels.  (Dan)
* Put the right version and copyright information inside the
  beagle-search about box.  (Dan)
* Various local time vs. UTC bugs in several tools.  (Dan, Joe)
* Many other localization fixes.  (Dan, Joe)
* Fix a file descriptor leak in the IM log viewer.  (Joe)
* Fix a quoting problem with beagle-query so that quoted phrases are
  searched properly.  (Joe)
* Fix beagle-build-index to handle failure conditions better.  (Joe)
* Be even more paranoid about deleting the target directory in
  beagle-build-index; refuse to do it if any non-Beagle files or
  directories are present.  (Joe)
* When creating indexes with beagle-build-index, don't make the text
  caches unreadable by default.
* Use ionice in beagle-crawl-system to set the IO priority to idle.
  (Joe)
* Add a new option to beagle-dump-index to get information about a
  file from the index.  (Bera)

Everything Else:
* Most processes set their names using prctl(); meaning you can now
  use pidof or killall when dealing with Beagle processes.  (Joe,
  Aaron Bockover)
* Fix our sqlite version detection in configure.in.  (Daniel)
* Only install beagle-settings.desktop when ENABLE_GUI is chosen.
  (Daniel)
* Internationalize the beagle-search.desktop file.  (Joe)
* Install mono's mdb files so that stack traces include additional
  information for easier debugging.  (Joe)

Translations:
* Added Italian translation.  (Luca Ferretti)
* Updated British English translation.  (Christopher Orr)
* Updated Bulgarian translation.  (Rostislav Raykov, Vladimir Petkov)
* Updated Czech translation.  (Jakub Friedl)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Vincent van Adrighem)
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated Galician translation.  (Ignacio Casal Quinteiro)
* Updated Hungarian translation.  (Gabor Kelemen)
* Updated Lithuanian translation.  (Žygimantas Beručka)
* Updated Norwegian bokmål translation.  (Kjartan Maraas)
* Updated Polish translation.  (Krzysztof Rosiński)
* Updated Russian translation.  (Leonid Kanter)
* Updated Simplified Chinese translation.  (Funda Wang)
* Updated Spanish translation.  (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)
* Updated Vietnamese translation.  (Clytie Siddall)


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.