ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.3.8

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

Hello,
  I am pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.3.8, the next
feature release of the 0.3 series. There are lots of new features, GUI
changes and bug fixes; see below for the rather large list. Due to
time constraints, we could not get the translations up-to-date for the
GUI. Expect a release shortly with up to date translations.

THE SHORT OF IT
---------------
Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and
unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time.

To download the 0.3.8 release or learn more about Beagle, visit
the Beagle web page:
  http://beagle-project.org

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 and a browser
interface for searching its indexes.

To learn more about Beagle, visit:
  http://beagle-project.org/About

IMPORTANT CHANGES between 0.3.7 and 0.3.8
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Dependencies:

* Update local copy of SemWeb and include it under GPLv3 instead of CC-by-2.0.

* Update beagle-settings-qt requirements: look for either qyoto.pc or
qt-dotnet.dll.

* Remove internal taglib-sharp. We now require that taglib-sharp be installed.

* Remove the build dependency of sqlite3-devel,

* Fix our D-Bus requirements. System D-Bus is an optional requirement
for beagled.
  Session D-Bus is a necessary requirement for "beagle-search --icon".
Distributions
  should make beagle-search depend on something that starts session
D-Bus at login
  (e.g. KDE3 does not automatically start D-Bus at login).

* Explicitly use -lX11 to build libbeagleuiglue.so. Fixes #540120.

* Require gtk+/# >= 2.10.

* Remove the build dependencies of libgnome-2.0-dev and libgnomevfs-dev.

Features:

* Add a SemWeb based adapter for querying beagle using RDF.
  Strictly experimental and enabled only with --enable-rdf-adapter.
  (http://beagle-project.org/RDF)

* Add the GMail backend related options to beagle-settings-qt.

* Add a BibTex filter based on the command line program 'bibparse'.
  bibparse is a run-time requirement and can be found in the btparse package.

* Add infrastructure and command-line tools to create and manage
  static indexes for removable sources.
  (http://beagle-project.org/Static_Indexes#Indexing_Removable_Medium)

* Add a crawl-rule for indexing executables in /usr/bin, /bin etc.
  Add beagle-crawl-system [--list] [crawl-<name>] options to list the system
  indexes and selectively update only one system index.

* Add support for snippets for remote beagled query.

* Add support for KDE4 konqueror history.

* Show a drop-down list in beagle-search to choose search categories.
  This was previously hidden in the menus. Use BEAGLE_SEARCH_SCOPE
  environment variable to allow users to create custom categories.

* Add menu options to beagle-search to start and stop beagled and
  show index statistics.

* Enable the Open-With context-menu in beagle-search results.

* Include a python script to grab shortcut keys from beagle-settings
  (distributed under GPL3).

Bugfixes:

* Focus the search entry is there are no results initially. Fixes #529540.

* Fix a regression where searching applications and other system wide indexes
 were disabled by default in beagle-search.

* Update Evolution backend for the new Evolution-Sharp API. Fixes #526685.

* Use the correct protocol for evolution-tasks "task:///...". Fixes #530624.

* Handle corrupt config files. Fixes #532308.

* Fix parsing of Opera history cache. Fixes #533529.

* If the firefox extension does not find ~/.beagle, show the message in the
  icon tooltip instead of showing the disruptive alert. Fixes debian
#463922, bnc #385513.

* Handle rogue backends if they start throwing lots of errors. This will
  save the log files from getting flooded with unnecessary exceptions.

* Fix the spreadsheet filter which was broken since 2007!

* Correctly generate URIs for child-indexables (e.g. archive contents,
  docbook entries). Fixes #535020.

* Fix the docbook filter to not return unnecessary matches when only
  one docbook section matches the query.

* Show an error dialog if beagle-settings encounters an unhandled exception.
  This gives a better feedback to the user. Fixes #541134.

* Always show the filename separately in the beagle-search results. Show the
  filename instead of document title for pdf, odt etc. files whose
titles are mostly
  unset or auto-generated.

* Do not index javascript: pages in the firefox extension.

* Properly parse Pidgin log files with smilies; these lines used to throw
  an exception earlier.

* Support KMail-3 in KDE4. Fixes #540153.

* The FileSystem backend now correctly handles filenames in a
   non-utf8 locale if MONO_EXTERNAL_ENCODINGS is set to the platform encoding.
  Fixes #440458.

* Fix a bug where beagled sometimes returns less than 100
(max-results) results even
  though more results are available.

Translations:
  - Hungarian (Gabor Kelemen)
  - Spanish (Jorge Gonzalez)
  - Italian (Gianvito Cavasoli)
  - Occitan (Yannig Marchegay)
  - French (Claude Paroz)
  - Brazilian Portuguese (Fábio Nogueira)
  - Czech (Adrian Gunis (Fixes #537846))
  - Swedish (Daniel Nylander)
  - Norwegian bokmål (Kjartan Maraas)

Other contributors: Nirbheek Chauhan, Arun Chaganty, Florian Echtler.

Full set of changes:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_3_8/beagle/ChangeLog?view=markup

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

* If you use any torrent client or any other p2p application, add its download
  directory to the excluded directory list of beagled. Sometimes beagle can take
  a long time to parse partially downloaded files.

Enjoy,
- dBera