Hi,
I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.13. This is
a bug
fix release. 0.2.12 did not correctly filter Word,
PowerPoint, or
CHM files due to an uncaught bug, and in some cases not all
search
results were being displayed. Everyone is recommended to
update
to 0.2.13.
OUR MANY URLS
-------------
To download the 0.2.13 tarball or learn more, visit the
Beagle wiki at:
http://www.beagle-proje
ct.org
The latest gossip is available at:
http://www.planetbeagle.o
rg
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
You could call this a "brown paper bag" release:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/brown-paper-bag-bug.html
WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------
Beagle is a desktop-independent service for indexing and
searching
your data.
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,
audio and video formats. Beagle can extract information
from your
file system; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KMail emails;
Evolution,
Thunderbird, and KAddressbook addressbooks; Evolution
calendars; Gaim
and Kopete instant messenger conversations; feeds from
several RSS
aggregators; Tomboy, KNotes, and Labyrinth notes; Konqueror
browsing
history; system documentation; and more. Beagle also
indexes tags on
your photos from F-Spot and Digikam.
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 an optional GNOME-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 1.1.13.5 or better, along with the full Mono stack
* glib-sharp 2.4.0 or better (for the daemon and tools)
* gtk-sharp 2.4.0 or better (for the UI and some backends)
* GMime 2.2.0
* Libexif 0.5.7 or better
* shared-mime-info
For the best possible Beagle experience, you should also
have:
* Mono 1.1.16 or better, note that Mono 1.2 has a bug with
extended
attributes. For now we recommend against using Mono
1.2.0.
* Evolution-sharp 0.11.1 for Evoltuion Data Server 1.6.x or
older, or
0.12.0 for Evolution Data Server 1.8.x.
* libgsf 1.14.1 and gsf-sharp 0.8.1 from
http://primates.ximian.com/~joe/gsf-sharp-0.8.1.tar.gz
* Galago 0.5.x
* Either wv 1.2.0, or a *patched* wv 1.0.3 --- the patch is
available from
http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/beagle/wv-libo
le2-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 0.2.12
--------------------
Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Nice +15 the helper process on startup, since filtering
certain
files can take a while and we don't want to affect other
apps. (Joe
Shaw)
* Change the IO priority code to automatically fallback from
trying to
set idle priority to lowering the best effort level.
(Joe)
* Fix a bug in which the short circuiting code would cause
not all
results to be found. (Debajyoti Bera)
* Fix a bug in remote filesystem index synchronization when
home is on
a remote filesystem but BEAGLE_STORAGE is set to something
local.
(Joe)
* Add means to get the total number of Lucene matches that
are found.
* Fix broken UTC/local time mismatches in C clients. (Bera)
* Join threads together when shutting down so that all the
outstanding
work is processed before the final cleanup and exit.
(Joe)
* Further improve output logging in the daemon and index
helper.
(Joe)
Backends:
* Add "email" keyword mapping to KAddressbook
backend. (Bera)
* Fix a bug in which the extension keyword mapping wasn't
working with
the static backends. (Bera)
* Fix a bug in which directories weren't being returned in
results
from static backends. (Bera)
* Reduce memory usage slightly in Thunderbird backend by
avoiding
string allocations. (Kevin Kubasik)
* Handle null indexables in the indexing service backend.
(Joe)
* Fix a file descriptor leak in the Konqueror history
backend. (Joe)
* Fix a file descriptor leak in the KNotes backend. (Bera)
Filters:
* Fix conditional defines, to fix Word, PowerPoint, and CHM
filters.
(Joe)
* Index cell phone numbers in KAddressbook filter. (Bera)
* Fix Digikam tag parsing to add all tags, not just the
first one.
(Bera)
UI:
* Make the automatic search after a timeout in the text
entry
optional. (Lukas Lipka)
* Fix various i18n issues in the code. (Gabor Kelemen)
Tools:
* Use the watch command for beagle-status instead of our own
loop in
the shell script. (José Carlos García Sogo, Joe)
* Don't quote the query string in beagle-query, it breaks
advanced
query syntax. (Bera)
Translations:
* Added Arabic translation. (Djihed Afifi)
* Updated German translation. (Hendrik Richter)
* Updated Hungarian translation. (Gabor)
* Updated Norwegian bokmål translation. (Kjartan Maraas)
* Updated Spanish translation. (Francisco Javier F.
Serrador)
* Updated Swedish translation. (Daniel Nylander)
Everything else:
* Fix many warnings brought on by more strict Mono
compilers. (Lukas)
* Fix compilation issue when Thunderbird support is
disabled. (Priit
Laes)
* Add support for new heap-shot profiler to the scripts.
(Joe)
* Work around gettext's check for functions named
GetString() in the
Contact viewer and Thunderbird backend so that strings
that aren't
for translation aren't marked as such. (Joe)
KNOWN ISSUES
------------
Memory usage is in decline, but we still use more than we'd
like.
We continue to work on this.
In particular, the Thunderbird backend can take very large
amounts of
memory if you have large mailboxes. This issue is being
addressed.
Certain extremely large documents can temporarily degrade
your
system's performance while they are being indexed.
There are some race conditions that can occur with certain
combinations of
file system operations. In very rare cases it might be
necessary to stop
and restart the daemon.
Certain files can crash the underlying libraries Beagle uses
to
extract metadata. This has been observed in MS Word and JPG
files.
If you encounter such a crash, please report it to the
upstream
developer of those libraries (wv1 and libexif for the above,
respectively).
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.
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