ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.10

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.10.  This is a bug fix
release.  This release fixes a problem where deleted files were not
being reported to clients correctly.


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

To download the 0.2.10 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

In Boston, Level 3 is the highest classification for hazardous
material spills:
http://www2.townonline.com/allston/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=576736


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 2.4.0 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 0.2.9
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Fix the way we escape URIs throughout the codebase to conform more
  to the RFC and so less-accepting apps work with UTF-8 filenames.
  (Joe Shaw)
* Use the GTK+ version of xdgmime instead of the upstream version as
  it appears to be the canonical one.  Fixes the ever-increasing time
  to filter certain files (particularly Java archives (jar),
  Javascript and Matlab files).  (Joe, Bera)
* Improve logging when we are unable to filter a file.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Fix a bug in which file removals weren't being handled correctly.
  (Joe)
* Fix a problem in which directories with hundreds of files with long
  filenames weren't being completely indexed.  (Joe, Kent Borg)
* Fix a bug in the Evolution mail backend in which subfolders weren't
  getting updated in a timely manner.  (Joe)
* Indexing account data in non-standard places in the Thunderbird
  backend should now work better.  (Pierre �tlund)
* Fix bugs when parsing Thunderbird accounts.  (Pierre)
* Read the Thunderbird mailbox name from the Mork file for prettier
  output.  (Pierre)

Filters:
* Add whitespace after attributes in the HTML filter.   (Debajyoti
  Bera)
* Fix a problem where the MPlayer filter was failing in locales which
  use commas instead of periods for decimal points.  (Joe)
* Blacklist signature, MS TNEF, vCard and iCal attachments from mails
  because they (currently) have no indexing value.  (Joe)
* Fix a bug in which mail attachments with capitalized MIME types
  weren't being recognized and indexed correctly.  (Joe)
* Add a bunch of additional MIME types to the C, C++ and shell script
  filters.  (Joe)
* Capture warnings and errors from the PDF commands and log them as
  warnings.  (Joe)
* Fix lifecycle issues in the OLE-based filters (PowerPoint and Word)
  that were causing files to never be closed.  You also need gsf-sharp
  0.8.1 for this to work correctly.  (Joe)

UI:
* Add support for Galago 0.5 and put some presence info in the UI.
  (Kevin Kubasik)
* Fix the dreaded focus stealing bug once and for all.  (Joe)
* Don't crash when we get an empty list for "Open With..." handlers.
  (Lukas)
* Fix a problem in which the mail client wasn't opening correctly for
  mail attachments.  (Kevin)

Bindings:
* Fix some compile warnings in libbeagle.  (Joe Hargadon)

Tools:
* Fix a plural string in the contact viewer for i18n.  (Joe)

Translations:
* Updated British English translation.  (David Lodge)
* Updated Catalan translation.  (Jordi Mas)
* Updated Czech translation.  (Jakub Friedl)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Tino Meinen)
* Updated Macedonian translation.  (Jovan Naumovski)
* Updated Finnish translation.  (Ilkka Tuohela)
* Updated Norwegian bokm�translation.  (Kjartan Maraas)
* Updated Russian translation.  (Alexander Sigachov)
* Updated Spanish translation.  (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)
* Updated Swedish translation.  (Daniel Nylander)

Everything else:
* Add support for Epiphany 2.16.  (Joe)
* Require stable versions of gtk-sharp (2.4.0) and gmime-sharp
  (2.2.0).  (Joe)
* Install the beagle-ui.pc pkg-config file only if the UI is built.
  (Bera)


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.