ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.11

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.11.  This version
includes new KAddressbook, KNotes, and Labyrinth backends, as well as
a new Totem video filter.  This version also features vastly improved
search performance, especially with common searches.


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

To download the 0.2.11 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

Charles Darwin was one of the first to write about carniverous plants:
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect01.htm


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
 
Beagle is a desktop-independent service for indexing and searching
your data.

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,
audio and video formats.  Beagle can extract information from your
file system; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KMail emails; Evolution,
Thunderbird, and KAddressbook addressbooks; Evolution calendars; Gaim
and Kopete instant messenger conversations; feeds from several RSS
aggregators; Tomboy, KNotes, and Labyrinth notes; Konqueror browsing
history; system documentation; and more.  Beagle also indexes tags on
your photos from F-Spot and Digikam.

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 an optional GNOME-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 1.1.13.5 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* glib-sharp 2.4.0 or better (for the daemon and tools)
* gtk-sharp 2.4.0 or better (for the UI and some backends)
* GMime 2.2.0
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better
* shared-mime-info

For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have:
* Mono 1.1.16 or better
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 or 0.11.1
* libgsf 1.14.1 and gsf-sharp 0.8.1 from
  http://primates.ximian.com/~joe/gsf-sharp-0.8.1.tar.gz
* Galago 0.5.x
* 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 0.2.10
--------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Update our internal Lucene.Net copy to 1.9.1 (Debajyoti Bera, Joe
  Shaw)
* Greatly optimize search times for queries that match a large number
  of documents.  (Joe)
* Backport optimizations from the Java Lucene development branch to
  improve search times.  (Joe)
* Allow filters to set the timestamp of a document.  (Bera)
* Update the inotify code from the kernel tree.  (Robert Love)
* Remove remnants of the old web services code.  (Fredrik Hedberg)

Backends:
* Added KNotes backend.  (Bera)
* Added KAddressbook backend.  (Bera)
* Added Labyrinth backend.  (Kevin Kubasik)
* Optimize the Tomboy backend when users have many notes.  (Kevin)
* Display nicer file URIs for folders instead of UIDs when indexing.
  (Joe)

Filters:
* Added Totem filter.  (Bastien Nocera, Joe)
* Give the external filter priority over other filters, so that users
  can override existing filters if they want.  (Bera)
* Add "speakingto" as a search property.  (Kevin)
* Fix a crasher on TIFF files with bad datetime strings.  (Kevin)
* Check for illegal lengths in the PowerPoint filter.  (Bera)

UI:
* Make the scopes toggles rather than radio buttons, allowing the user
  to turn them on and off from the UI.  (Max Wiehle, Joe)
* Add a details pane toggle, and move the Sort items into a new View
  menu.  (Ryan Probasco)
* Add bug-buddy support to the search and settings .desktop files.
  (Kevin)
* Use the looking glass icon for the beagle-settings window.
  (Fredrik)
* Small formatting fix in the IM log viewer.  (Kevin)
* Fix a UI glitch with border widths.  (Fredrik)

Tools:
* Allow the user to request multiple pieces of information with the
  beagle-info tool.  (Bera)
* Print the timestamp in the beagle-extract-content tool.  (bera)

Translations:
* Added Serbian translation.  (Filip Miletić)
* Added Thai translation.  (Supranee Thirawatthanasuk)
* Updated Catalan translation.  (Jordi Mas)
* Updated Lithuanian translation.  (Žygimantas Beručka)
* Updated Polish translation.  (Krzysztof Rosiński)
* Updated Swedish translation.  (Daniel Nylander)

Everything else:
* Allow compile-time selection of the sqlite version to be used.
  (Kevin)


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

We still use a bit too much memory.  We are working on it.

In particular, the Thunderbird backend can take very large amounts of
memory if you have large mailboxes.  This issue is being addressed.

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.

Certain files can crash the underlying libraries Beagle uses to
extract metadata.  This has been observed in MS Word and JPG files.
If you encounter such a crash, please report it to the upstream
developer of those libraries (wv1 and libexif for the above, respectively).

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.