Hi, I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.1.4.
The focus of this release has been bug fixing. A number of bugs related to limiting searches by source, getting snippets for results, searching for files by extension, ID3 tags within audio files, among many others have been fixed. IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT MONO 1.1.12 -------------------------------- This version of Beagle will not build unpatched against Mono 1.1.12 as currently released. This is because of an incompatible API change in one of the assemblies Beagle uses. The Mono developers will be fixing this issue soon. In the meantime, you can apply the following patch to your beagle source tree: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=56272&action=view OUR MANY URLS ------------- To download the 0.1.4 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 Mercury is a liquid at room temperature because its valence electrons are not easily shared, weakening mercury-mercury bonding: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/periodic/faq/why-is-mercury-liquid.shtml 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 also provides Firefox and Epiphany extensions that allow web pages to be indexed as the user visits them. Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the prodigious Doug Cutting. Best is a graphical tool for searching the index that the daemon creates. Best doesn't query the index directly; it passes the search terms to the daemon and the daemon sends any matches back to Best. Best 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 has many dependencies, and thus can be difficult to compile. It requires: * Mono 1.1.10 or better, along with the full Mono stack * Gecko-sharp 2.0 * gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better * Gmime 2.1.16 * Libexif 0.5.7 or better For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have: * Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 * libgsf 1.12.1 and gsf-sharp 0.6 * 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 0.24-enabled kernel. Inotify is in the mainline Linux kernel as of 2.6.13. CHANGES SINCE 0.1.3 ------------------- Daemon/Infrastructure: * Clean up snippet requesting API to be much simpler for clients. (Joe Shaw, Jon Trowbridge) * Fix libbeagle to allow snippets to be requested. (Joe) * Fix date range queries in libbeagle. (D Bera, Joe) * Fix filtering by source in libbeagle. (Joe) * Fix file extension queries. ie, "ext:jpg". (Bera) * Pre-initialize the serializer in connection handler. Removes the slight lag in the first response. (Bera) * Added beagle:NoPunctFilename property to files. (Jon) * Clean up error handling in the message passing code to aid debugging. (Joe) * Add unstored properties, so that indexables can send "hints" to filters. (Bera) * Fix properties to be both searched and stored by default in libbeagle. (Joe) * Wait up to a minute for the index helper process to start, as it may take longer than the previous 4 seconds to respond to messages. (Bera, Joe) * Fix an unlikely race in the messaging server which would throw an exception if the daemon was shut down before it had finished starting. (Joe) * Remove the unused "cancelled" query response. (Joe) Backends: * Enable the Konqueror history backend by default. (Bera) * Use indexable hints in KonqQueryable to pass charset information to the filter. (Bera) * Check for additional inotify events when indexing Gaim logs, so that they are indexed whenever a message is received and not only when the conversation is closed. (Joe) * Add progress percentages to the Evolution mail backend. (Joe) Filters: * Fix a bug which caused the daemon to hang when indexing certain Powerpoint files. (Veerapuram Varadhan) * Entagged-sharp tree update. (Daniel Drake) * Id3v2.4 tag parsing. (Raphael Slinckx) * ASF/WMA file support. (Christian Laireiter) * Extract and index keyword fields from OpenOffice documents. (Daniel Naber) * Handle multipart/alternative correctly in the mail filter, only indexing the richest alternative we can support. (Joe) * Don't set the hasAttachment flag based on multipart/alternative parts. (Joe) UI/Tools: * Lots of improvements to Bludgeon. (Jon) * Set the source in beagle-build-index, and allow it to be configurable. Fixes a bug where snippets were not returned from static queryables that had text caches. (Joe) * Fix a cut-and-paste error beagle-crawl-system to correctly pass in deny patterns to --deny-pattern. (Joe) Translations: * Added Lithuanian translation. (Žygimantas Beručka) * Updated Japanese translation. (Takeshi AIHANA) * Updated Traditional Chinese translation. (Chao-Hsiung Liao) * Updated German translation. (Hendrik Brandt) Everything Else: * Look for Firefox 1.5 headers in a few different places for best compatibility. (Joe) * Get the Evolution library directory from evolution-sharp, and pass it into the beagled script. (Joe, Ryan Skadberg) KNOWN ISSUES ------------ Yes, we know we use too much memory. We are working on it. Extreme spikes in memory usage have been observed in some cases. Certain extremely large documents (particularly large HTML files) can temporarily degrade your system's performance while they are being indexed. In most of these cases, the memory is reclaimed by the system relatively quickly after the document is indexed. There are other still-unexplained cases of excessive memory use, particularly on SMP systems. 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. The CHM filter has been disabled for this release because the HTML filter it is based upon has changed, and it has not been updated. 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. _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list Dashboard-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
