ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.9

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.9.  This is a bug fix
release.


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

To download the 0.2.9 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

Former Beagle maintainer Jon Trowbridge is one of the world's foremost
experts in computational poetics:
http://www.beardofbees.com/gnoetry.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,
audio and video formats.  Beagle can extract information from your
file system; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KMail emails; Evolution and
Thunderbird addressbooks; Evolution calendars; Gaim and Kopete instant
messenger conversations; feeds from several RSS aggregators; Tomboy
notes; Konqueror browsing history; system documentation; and many
others.  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 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 1.1.13.5 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* glib-sharp 2.3.90 or better (for the daemon and tools)
* gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better (for the UI and some backends)
* GMime 2.1.19
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better
* shared-mime-info

For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have:
* Mono 1.1.16 or better
* GMime 2.2.1
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 or 0.11.1
* libgsf 1.12.1 and gsf-sharp 0.6 or libgsf 1.14 and gsf-sharp 0.7
* 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 0.2.8
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Fix a performance bottleneck which slowed down indexing noticably.
  (Joe Shaw)
* Fix some DllImports so that development packages aren't needed on
  many distributions.  (Frederic Crozat)

Backends:
* Add sanity checks to the Gaim backend to deal with logs that
  couldn't be parsed.  (Joe)

Filters:
* Fix a bug in parsing emote lines from IM logs that was introduced in
  0.2.8.  (Joe)
* Be more bulletproof when processing lines in IM logs.  (Arif Lukito,
  Lukas Lipka)
* Handle linebreaks correctly as whitespace in plain text emails.
  (Joe)

UI:
* Don't crash if we can't launch the web browser.  (Lukas)
* Fix an infinite loop when saving thumbnails failed in GNOME
  libraries.  (Joe, Lukas)
* Execute either "thunderbird" or "mozilla-thunderbird" depending on
  which is available.  (Kevin Kubasik, Joe)
* Display an ellipsis in calendar descriptions that linewrap.  (Lukas)
* Present the window in tray icon mode to ensure that the window is
  displayed on top.  (Lukas)
* Hide and unhide the window properly.  (Arif)

Bindings:
* Fix some C++ style comments in libbeagle's header files.  (Lukas)
* Fix a warning in libbeagle about a dangling comma.  (Lukas)

Tools:
* Don't display timeline categories that don't have any logs in the IM
  viewer.  (Lukas)
* Fix a few places where we assumed that /bin/sh was bash.  (Joe)

Translations:
* Updated Catalan translation.  (Jordi Mas)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Tino Meinen, Karel Demeyer)
* Updated French translation.  (Damien Durand)
* Updated Macedonian translation.  (Jovan Naumovski)
* Updated Simplified Chinese translation.  (Funda Wang)
* Updated Vietnamese translation.  (Clytie Siddall)


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

We still use a bit 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.

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.