ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.3.0 and Beagle-Xesam 0.1

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.3.0.  This is a new
major release.

As of this release, libbeagle is distributed as a separate tarball
from Beagle, which makes building of lower-level components which
could depend on libbeagle (like GTK+) easier by removing a circular
dependency.

We are also releasing Beagle-Xesam 0.1, an adaptor to add support
for the Xesam D-Bus freedesktop.org spec.

To download, visit the Beagle web page:

    http://beagle-project.org

WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
Beagle is a service for Linux desktops which transparently and
unobtrusively indexes your data in near real-time.  For example:

* Files are immediately indexed when they are created, re-indexed when
  they are modified, and dropped from the index upon deletion.
* E-mails are indexed upon arrival.
* IM conversations are indexed as you chat, a line at a time.
* Web pages are indexed as you view them (with a browser extension)

Beagle supports many different data sources and file formats.  For a
complete listing, visit:

    http://beagle-project.org/Supported_Filetypes

Beagle includes an optional GNOME-based graphical tool for searching
its indexes.

To learn more about Beagle, visit:

    http://beagle-project.org/About

WHAT'S NEW?
-----------
* Many speed and memory performance improvements in both indexing and
  searching throughout the code.

* Support for date queries in the query language.  For example,
  "date:2006" will return documents from 2006.  "date:2005.04" will
  return documents from April 2005.  Ranges are also supported.  For
  example, "date:2006.05.01-2007" will return all documents
  between May 1, 2006 and December 31, 2006.

* Rewritten Thunderbird backend, which uses a Thunderbird extension to
  send data to be indexed to the Beagle daemon.

* All new Firefox and Epiphany extensions.

* Experimental network searches.  You can search between multiple
  Beagle daemons, which can be automatically discovered through
  Avahi.  Daemons can also be manually configured, useful for WAN
  searches.

* Experimental web interface to the Beagle daemon.  An AJAX interface
  allows users to search for data through their web browser.

* Support for additional external metadata on previously-indexed
  documents.  This allows new backends or external applications to
  attach metadata that can then be searched on.

* New Nautilus metadata backend, implemented on top of the new
  external metadata support.  Indexes Nautilus emblems and notes, and
  adds search keywords for these.

* Snowball analyzers are now used to process text.  This is the first
  step toward language specific analyzers.

* New Opera history backend.

* Individual backends can now be enabled and disabled using the
  beagle-settings tool.

* Ignored file patterns (like *.o, *.a, *~, etc.) are no longer
  hardcoded, and can be set through the configuration.

* Changes to our TextCache to use a sqlite database for small files
  and on-disk files for larger ones.  This makes the disk usage of the
  TextCache much more efficient.

* Use Mono's updated Mono.Data.Sqlite code, rather than our own hacked
  up copy of the old Mono.Data.SqliteClient code.  As a result of
  this, we now require sqlite3.

* A new configuration system, which allows system administrators to
  set defaults in /etc/beagle/config-files.  This also makes it easier
  for backend and filter authors to add their own configuration
  settings.

* Use taglib-sharp (replacing unmaintained entagged-sharp) for
  extracting metadata from audio files.

* An option to turn off aggressive indexing of data while the
  screensaver is on.

* A new classification for files -- the "file type" -- which
  classifies similar types together.  For instance, PNGs, JPEGs, and
  GIFs all have file type "image".  These can be searched using the
  "filetype" keyword.

* Now store snippets for emails.

* New extended attribute format.  Beagle now uses a single extended
  attribute, user.Beagle, to store all of its information.  The old
  format is migrated to the new one as files are reindexed.

* Queries are run serially rather than in parallel, since most of the
  search overhead is in disk IO.  Reduces memory usage considerably,
  and helps prevent disk thrashing on large searches.

* Print out warnings about possibly insufficient inotify watches, and
  don't periodically recrawl directories that don't have them.  Fixes
  the 100% CPU indexing loop bug of death.

* Various tweaks to the scheduler, to make throttle large numbers of
  tasks better.

* Handle large batches of file deletions (ie, an "rm -rf" on a
  directory) and file additions (ie, untarring into a watched
  directory) in a much more efficient manner.

* Require evolution-sharp 0.12, which implies Evolution 2.8 or 2.10
  because of API changes to the library.

* Some experimental support for XMP sidecar files.

* A new QueryPart for searching explicitly for URIs.

* Support for excluding KMail folders.

* Support for indexing Evolution notes.

* Refactor the indexing of IM conversations.

* New TeX filter.

* Structure snippets rather than returning them as HTML strings.
  This gives application authors considerably more control over how
  to display them.

* Scan the first 4k of files to determine their MIME type in addition
  to looking at the file extension, and choose the better match.

* PDFs are now included when indexing system documentation.

* Improvements to indexing files inside archives.  Now all extracted
  files are handled in the index helper process, removing a costly
  round trip.

* Redirect crash logs from Mono into the Beagle log files.  They were
  previously lost and users had to reproduce problems with --fg.

* Add many more keywords to the query language; run beagle-query
  --keywords to see a full list.

* Lots and lots of indexing and searching bugfixes.  Too many to
  count.

* Translations:

  - Arabic		   (Djihed Afifi)
  - Basque		   (Mikel Paskual, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio)
  - Brazillian Portuguese  (Igor Pires Soares, Raul Pereira,
			    Leonardo Fontenelle, Og Maciel)
  - British English	   (David Lodge)
  - Catalan		   (Jordi Mas)
  - Czech		   (Jakub Freidl)
  - Dzongkha		   (Pema Geyleg)
  - Finnish		   (Ilkka Tuohela)
  - French		   (Guillaume Ayoub, Stéphane Raimbault,
			    Christophe Bilard, Claude Paroz)
  - Galician		   (Ignacio Casal Quinteiro)
  - Hungarian		   (Gabor Kelemen)
  - Japanese		   (Takeshi Aihana)
  - Latvian		   (Raivis Dejus)
  - Macedonian		   (Arangel Angov, Jovan Naumovski)
  - Norwegian bokmål	   (Kjartan Maraas)
  - Occitan		   (Yannig Marchegay)
  - Polish		   (GNOME PL Team)
  - Portuguese		   (Filipe Gomes)
  - Simplified Chinese	   (Funda Wang)
  - Spanish		   (Roberto Majadas, Jorge Gonzalez)
  - Swedish		   (Daniel Nylander)

Contributors to this release: Debajyoti Bera, Joe Shaw, Lukas Lipka,
Pierre Östlund, Tao Fei, Arun Raghavan, Nirbheek Chauhan, Kevin
Kubasik, Alexis Christoforides, Kyle Ambroff, Fredrik Hedberg, Larry
Ewing, Pat Double, Matteo Gottardi, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo, Joseph
Benavidez, Enrico Minack, JP Rosevear, Jason Kivlighn, and Stephane
Loeuillet.

Full set of changes:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_3_0/beagle/ChangeLog?view=markup
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_3_0/libbeagle/ChangeLog?view=markup
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_XESAM_0_1/ChangeLog?view=markup

Joe