I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.1.3. Our focus continues to be on fixing bugs and reducing the Beagle daemon's memory usage. This release also contains our new Python bindings, courtesy of Raphael Slinckx. With them, you can easily access Beagle search results from any Python program. Let the hacking begin.
Remember, Beagle now requires Mono 1.1.10. But you are already running 1.1.10, because you are nobody's fool. You are also extremely well-dressed, and people enjoy your company. OUR MANY URLS ------------- To download the 0.1.3 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 London Bills of Mortality: http://www.davidorme.demon.co.uk/plague10.htm 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 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 * gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better * Gecko-sharp 2.0 * 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 0.1.2 ------------------- Daemon/Infrastructure: * Python bindings. (Raphael Slinckx, Joe Shaw) * Fix a crash when trying to search backends without a secondary index. (Joe) * Use Mono's UnixClient and UnixListener, now that we require mono 1.1.10. (Joe) * Use Mono.Unix.Native. (Daniel Drake) * Added support for index-listener queries: these are special queries that return no initial results but which get live query notification of every index change. (Jon Trowbridge) Backends: * Gaim log backend optimizations and cleanups. (Daniel) * Fixed a bug in LuceneFileQueryable where it wasnt setting the attribute of a file shared across multiple indexables. (Bera) * Properly use LuceneFileQueryable in blog backends. (Bera) * Initial release of Konqueror webhistory backend. (Bera) Filters: * FilterHtml optimisations, change it to be event driven instead of DOM-based. (D Bera) * Use charset meta-type specified in HTML file to determine file encoding. (Bera) * Extract non-english URLs in html documents correctly. (Bera) * New Shellscript filter. (Varadhan) * Fix for reducing memory-allocations in Filter.cs. (Varadhan) * Fix for reducing memory-allocations in FilterSource.cs (Varadhan) * Updated image filters. (Lukas) * Index width and height for JPEG images into the correct property. (Lukas) * Added fspot:IsIndexed field to images. (Lukas) * Index category field for .desktop files. (Lukas) UI/Tools: * Fixed the blog tile. (Daniel) * Fix some problems in the beagle-crawl-system script that would result in TextCaches being created incorrectly, causing problems when searching. (Sylvain Goletto, Joe) * Fix a crash of the Epiphany extension on x86-64 machines. (Stanislav Brabec, Joe) * Save best window settings even when ran with --no-tray. (Bera) * Allow beagle-extract-content to store output in a file. (Bera) * Stop live-query when "clear" button is pressed in Best. (Bera) * Translations: * Updated Hungarian translation. (Gabor Kelemen) * Updated Spanish translation. (Francisco Javier F. Serrador) Everything Else: * Cleaned up compiler warnings. (Joe, Lukas) * Small fixes to the included spec file. (Richard Dawe) * Also include pre-i18n desktop files in the tarball; fixes a problem where you couldn't "make" after a "make clean" in the 0.1.2 tarball. (Joe) * Best can now be built on firefox 1.5. (Daniel) * Allow beagle to be built against Mozilla xulrunner. (Joe) 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. 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. The web services interface has been disabled since KN Vijay is no longer maintaining them. We strongly recommend that you use the C, C# or Python client libraries to communicate with the Beagle Daemon. _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
