Hi, the goal of this email is to set the directions for the next release of Kat. I will try to answer recurring questions.
1. Current status of development Currently we have version 0.6.x in trunk and 0.7.x (Praveen's branch) in branches. I have come to this because Praveen has been unavailable for long time and has not been able to communicate anything about his future availability. This means that we will continue developing the 0.6.x series for a while. I hope he will come back someday, but Kat's development has to continue anyway. Praveen started refactoring the API, documenting every class and method. This has to be continued. I will study his code and try to port it to the 0.6.x series. Any help with that will be really appreciated. 2. New API and new daemon Our major efforts have to be directed to the refactoring of the Kat API and Kat daemon. The new GUI can wait. We receive lots of bug reports about kded crashes and memory leaks. It is important to notice one simple thing: the index is built upon a loop. Loops, as every software engineer knows, are the most tricky parts of an application because even the smallest bug is amplified by the repetition of the code through cycles and a tiny memory leak rapidly becomes a huge hole that swallows all the memory of the machine. This means that this part of Kat should be designed with extreme care and tested thoroughfully. This also means that the complexity level of that part has to be maintained as low as possible. The KDED crashes will be avoided creating a simple Linux daemon for Kat and a KDED proxy for controlling it. This means that a crash of the daemon should not propagate to the KDED. Obviously we will try to avoid any crashes at all. 3. CLuceneQt Ben van Klinken, creator of the CLucene port of Apache Lucene, offered his help in introducing Lucene into the Kat project. He did more than this: he created a Qt port of CLucene. The CLuceneQt library will be used by our new indexer. This should increase the speed of the indexing process and also give Kat the possibility to exploit the powerful query capabilities of Lucene. We will continue to use the SQLite3 for storing the things that Lucene does not handle, like the thumbnails, the metadata and the full text. 4. Problems with the new version of SQLite3 (3.2.6) SQLITE_MISUSE The new versions of SQLite3 are more strict than the previous ones about the way a db handle has to be accessed. Versions > 3.2.6 do not allow the same db handle to be used in different threads. Since this was the "normal" behavior of our code, we will have to change it radically in order to comply with this new policy. Final considerations: Kat is an extremely young project and it is still in BETA version. There are huge expectations about it, but people must understand that we cannot make miracles. I also have to convince myself about that :-D As said before, any help will be really appreciated. Regards -- Roberto Cappuccio Independent open source developer - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://robertocappuccio.blogspot.com Kat Desktop Search Environment - http://kat.mandriva.com - #kat on irc.freenode.org ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Kat-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kat-development
