Hi, I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.5.
Version 0.2.4 shipped with a broken HTML filter, which meant that web pages that were indexed because of the Firefox extension couldn't be searched. This release fixes that. Also fixed is a compilation error triggered by the more strict Mono 1.1.14 C# compiler. This version is also the first to correctly handle a broken X connection, meaning Beagle will now shut down cleanly when you log out if you started it at login. OUR MANY URLS ------------- To download the 0.2.5 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 April is International Guitar Month: http://www.discoverguitar.com/home.html 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 index web pages in real-time 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 1.1.13.5 * GMime 2.2.1 * 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. And other optional dependencies: http://beagle-project.org/Optional_Prerequisites CHANGES SINCE 0.2.4 ------------------- Daemon/Infrastructure: * Shut the daemon down cleanly on a broken X connection, since we can't gracefully recover from it. (Joe Shaw) * Unset the DISPLAY variable in the index helper, since it should never get an X connection. (Joe) * Enabled and disabled backends can now be saved as part of the configuration, through the beagle-config tool. (D Bera) * Add a new --backends command-line that gives the user more control over what backends are started, given the new configuration. The --allow-backend and --deny-backend options are now deprecated. (Bera) * Don't allow the daemon to be run from sudo, since its default configuration causes broken permissions in ~/.beagle and ~/.wapi. (Joe) * Make sure HOME or BEAGLE_HOME is set before starting the daemon. (Joe) * Change to using glib's g_spawn to launch programs, rather than .Net's own internal Process class. (Joe) * If we can't set the IO priority class to idle, at least set the priority to the lowest in our current class. (Joe) * Use the newner kernel syscall interface for gettid(). (LaMont Jones) Backends: * Add a bunch of checks to the file system backend to help deal with rapid creation and deletion of files and directories. (Joe) * Enable snippets for KMail maildir emails. (Bera) * Extract text more correctly from Tomboy notes. (Bera) * Fix a crash in the EvolutionDataServer backend when new sources are added for indexing. (Joe) Filters: * Fix a logical error in the HTML filter which prevented it from working properly in 0.2.4. (Joe) * Fix compilation of FilterTiff.cs with Mono 1.1.14. (Bera) * Add audio/x-vorbis+ogg as a supported MIME type for the music filter. (Joe) * Open OLE filters (like MS Word) with libgsf's stdio interface rather than mmap, so that changes on disk don't corrupt the stream as it's being filtered. (Joe) UI: * Reset a finished query so that we don't crash. (Lukas Lipka) * Add Ctrl-L as an alternate keybinding to focus the search entry. (Dan Winship) * Don't steal the focus from the search entry if you do a search activated by timeout after a search activated by pressing enter. (Dan) * Make sure tiles are redrawn when you expand or contract the group. (Dan) * If an icon theme only has icons that are much larger than what is asked for, scale them down to the appropriate size. (Joe) Tools: * Explicitly set our .wapi dir in beagle-crawl-system to a temporary directory, so that it works without a home directory. (Bera) * Fix beagle-crawl-system to work when the user doesn't have a default shell. (Bera) * Add --list-backends and --list-static-indexes options to beagle-info. (Bera, Joe) * If we don't match a filter using beagle-extract-content, don't assume it's plain text. (Joe) * Display correct values for flags in beagle-dump-index. (Bera) * Don't install the beagle-crawl-system cronjob into libexec. (Joe) Bindings: * Use pyexecdir instead of pythondir for installing the python module. (Gentoo) Translations: * Updated Finnish translation. (Ilkka Tuohela) * Updated Hungarian translation. (Gabor Kelemen, Stanislav Brabec) * Updated Japanese translation. (Takeshi AIHANA) * Updated Swedish translation. (Daniel Nylander) KNOWN ISSUES ------------ Yes, we know we use too much memory. We are working on it. Certain extremely large documents can temporarily degrade your system's performance while they are being 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. _______________________________________________ gnome-announce-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-announce-list
