Hey folks,
Wanted to point out a couple of things.
* We had to bump ndesk-dbus requirement to 0.5.2 - the first version to be
thread safe. Anything lower could have caused deadlocks. Its nearly a year
that 0.5.2 was released so most distributions would be fine. Except Ubuntu
Gutsy shipped with 0.4.0 and they are not providing any update. However, I
was able to install ndesk-dbus from the Hardy repositories in Gutsy without
any problem; just that single deb had to be upgraded, no dependencies.
* For distributions, beagle now ships with several crawl-files to creating
system indexes and updating them nightly. Once created, updating is fast and
if done regularly should not take more than a couple of minutes. But user
experience can be improved significantly by making a few observations. We
cannot set these when we release and is best done at the distribution level.
- Set the correct paths in the crawl files. We tend to add all possible known
paths and all possible prefixes.
- I am not sure about enabling the windows index by default. Indexing windows
partition will definitely take a lot of time and lot of resources and might
take more than a couple of hours.
- Some users complained that the cron jobs started soon after they finished
installing the distribution - that will suck big time. It might be a good
idea to update the system with security updates and other cron jobs but
definitely not updating the index (not only for beagle, but also updating
index for man, updatedb)
- Ship with default indexes (I think OpenSUSE already does this). Create a
system wide index and ship it as a package. Then the users will not need the
first time crawling and indexing. Subsequent changes will be updates and will
be fast.
- The first night after installation is going to be rough for users :) As of
now, three heavy indexes will be built for the first time - applications,
manpages and documentation (and windows if that is enabled). E.g. building
manpages on my system took about 30-45 minutes. Documentation takes even
longer ... these are all text heavy data. If something can be done to make it
easier, then the users (myself included) will love it. I dont know much about
cron, but maybe the different indexes could be scheduled with different
intervals so that no two are on the same day for the first time.
If there is anything we need to do upstream, please email your suggestions.
Thanks.
- dBera
--
-
Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user
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