Hi, I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.2.
This is a bug fix release. Since 0.2.1, roughly 50 bugzilla bugs have been fixed. In particular, a large number of user interface and behavioral bugs in our new UI, beagle-search, have been fixed. As you will see in the changelog below, this is our most stable release ever. OUR MANY URLS ------------- To download the 0.2.2 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 Tug of war was an Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war 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 supports many different file formats including OpenOffice documents, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, HTML files, and many image and audio formats. Beagle can extract information from your file system, Evolution and KMail mailboxes, Evolution calendars and addressbooks, Gaim and Kopete instant messenger conversations, several RSS aggregators, Tomboy notes, system documentation, and many others. 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. Beagle includes a GTK-based graphical tool for searching the index that the daemon creates. This application doesn't query the index directly; it passes the search terms to the daemon and the daemon sends any matches back. The user interface 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 requires: * Mono 1.1.10 or better, along with the full Mono stack * gtk-sharp 2.3.90 or better * GMime 2.1.19 * Libexif 0.5.7 or better * shared-mime-info For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also have: * Mono 1.1.13 * 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-enabled kernel. Inotify is in the mainline Linux kernel as of 2.6.13. CHANGES SINCE 0.2.1 ------------------- Daemon/Infrastructure: * Fix an access violation crash when opening snippets on large documents. (Joe Shaw) * Update our internal sqlite bindings to include many upstream fixes. (Daniel Drake, Joe) * Fix a crash in the sqlite code on 64-bit machines. (Joe) * Fix a nasty bug in which certain items with non-file URIs weren't being indexed at all. (Joe, D Bera) * Fix a bug in which temp files weren't being cleaned up if a document wasn't indexed. (Joe) * Exit the daemon with error code 1 if it completely fails to run. (Joe) * Fix a bug in libbeagle in which some asynchronous requests would never return. (Joe) * Bump up priorities of child indexable tasks so that they don't queue up for a long time when the daemon is very busy. (Joe) * Fix an occasional but harmless exception on startup, and don't unnecessarily create BeagleConsole log files. (Joe) * Add keyword mappings for querying image comments and tags. (Bera) * Query the screensaver X extension before using it. (Joe) * Exit with an error if an unknown argument is passed into beagled. (Likas Lipka) Backends: * Fix the file system backend so that you can now index the root directory. (Joe) * Index publisher/channel title information from RSS feeds. (Bera) * Fix a leak in the KMail backend. (Joe) * Fix a useless cache that was leaking memory in the file system backend. (Joe) * Handle negative date values in the Liferea backend. (Joe) * Use the sent date when timestamping Evolution IMAP messages. (Joe) * Fix an exception with Evolution mails that used labels. (Joe) * Support new gaim 2.0 log files. (Joe) * Add checks to the Evolution Data Server backend so that having an unsupported e-d-s doesn't kill the daemon. (Joe) * Allow loading of backends from BEAGLE_BACKEND_PATH environment variable. (Joe) Filters: * Extract tags and comments from images with Digikam metadata. (Bera) * Don't pass in the document's title from the Firefox extension, since it will be extracted in the HTML filter. (Bera) * Pass encoding/charset information from the Firefox extension to the HTML filter so that documents that specify it in HTTP headers and not the HTML are indexed correctly. (Joe) * Catch exceptions stemming from sqlite version mismatches when opening the F-Spot database. (Joe) UI/Tools: * Fix colors and theming for many themes in beagle-search, including gtk-qt, Crux, and others. (Dan Winship) * Fix a crash when the spinner icon isn't available. (Dan) * Improve the UI when displaying many matches at once. (Dan) * Added a Tomboy note tile. (Joe) * Added a calendar tile. (Dan) * If there is only a single category of matches, start out in "Show More" mode. (Dan) * Don't display mail attachments as blank mail tiles. (Dan) * Allow results to be sorted by title, timestamp, and score. (Dan) * Fix thumbnailing in beagle-search, and make it asynchronous so that it doesn't block the UI. (Dan) * Fix a bug in which tiles would be unselected if a tile was resized or re-sorted. (Dan) * Fix a bug in which focus was lost if the user resized the details pane. (Dan) * Don't hide the details pane if the user clicks somewhere that isn't a tile. (Dan) * Hide the details pane when starting a new search. (Dan) * Hide the details pane if the selected hit disappears. (Dan) * Don't automatically focus the search results if the search happened because of a timeout. (Dan) * Display the full path to image files. (Lukas) * Don't display blank titles for files with empty title fields. (Lukas) * Make the generated thumbnails bigger in the details pane. (Lukas) * Load the buddy icon for the IM details pane. (Lukas) * Added support to beagle-search for the hide/show keybinding in icon mode. (Joe) * Added a page to tell root users that Beagle cannot be used as root. (Joe) * Make the creation of tiles easier by sharing much of the details code between them. (Dan) * Fix a problem in which the background of the tray icon wasn't transparent on KDE panels. (Dan) * Put the right version and copyright information inside the beagle-search about box. (Dan) * Various local time vs. UTC bugs in several tools. (Dan, Joe) * Many other localization fixes. (Dan, Joe) * Fix a file descriptor leak in the IM log viewer. (Joe) * Fix a quoting problem with beagle-query so that quoted phrases are searched properly. (Joe) * Fix beagle-build-index to handle failure conditions better. (Joe) * Be even more paranoid about deleting the target directory in beagle-build-index; refuse to do it if any non-Beagle files or directories are present. (Joe) * When creating indexes with beagle-build-index, don't make the text caches unreadable by default. * Use ionice in beagle-crawl-system to set the IO priority to idle. (Joe) * Add a new option to beagle-dump-index to get information about a file from the index. (Bera) Everything Else: * Most processes set their names using prctl(); meaning you can now use pidof or killall when dealing with Beagle processes. (Joe, Aaron Bockover) * Fix our sqlite version detection in configure.in. (Daniel) * Only install beagle-settings.desktop when ENABLE_GUI is chosen. (Daniel) * Internationalize the beagle-search.desktop file. (Joe) * Install mono's mdb files so that stack traces include additional information for easier debugging. (Joe) Translations: * Added Italian translation. (Luca Ferretti) * Updated British English translation. (Christopher Orr) * Updated Bulgarian translation. (Rostislav Raykov, Vladimir Petkov) * Updated Czech translation. (Jakub Friedl) * Updated Dutch translation. (Vincent van Adrighem) * Updated Finnish translation. (Ilkka Tuohela) * Updated Galician translation. (Ignacio Casal Quinteiro) * Updated Hungarian translation. (Gabor Kelemen) * Updated Lithuanian translation. (Žygimantas Beručka) * Updated Norwegian bokmål translation. (Kjartan Maraas) * Updated Polish translation. (Krzysztof Rosiński) * Updated Russian translation. (Leonid Kanter) * Updated Simplified Chinese translation. (Funda Wang) * Updated Spanish translation. (Francisco Javier F. Serrador) * Updated Vietnamese translation. (Clytie Siddall) 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 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. 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 because the HTML filter it is based upon has changed, and it has not been updated. The web services architecture has been deprecated and is no longer built. It has some design issues and is currently unmaintained. 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 [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
