Beagle hackfest wrap-up

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

Hey guys,

It's the end of a long and pretty exciting day in Bangalore here.  I
thought I'd write up a quick summary of some of the hacks that went into
the Beagle tree today, for those of you following.  All the things
mentioned below are now available.

Live Query Updates for Addressbook

        Dave Camp just committed his work to allow live query updates of
        the addressbook.  This means that open queries will update
        automatically as items change in the addressbook, or as new
        items are added.  This is of course based on the Evolution Data
        Server in Evolution.
        
Filter for TEXI files (Naggapan)

        Info files are now indexed.

Filter for RTF files

        Thanks to a lot of hard work, we now index RTF files.  Fully
        spec compliant.
        
Bugzilla Driver (Harish)

        Beagle can now, in a limited way, query a bugzilla database as
        part of a search.  This is limited to keywords which are the
        same as bugzilla ID numbers right now, though Harish is going to
        add some HTML screen-scraping so that general keyword searching
        on summary/assignee/reporter/comments can be done.
        
Source code indexing (Siva)

        Beagle can now index C#, Java and C files.  Adding support for C
        ++, Python, and others is little more than adding to the list of
        reserved words and putting the mime types into the supported
        list.  This is pretty awesome.  You can search identifiers,
        comments and strings.
        
        One remaining hack is to make Best put source code matches into
        a different category, outside of the Files category (which
        should probably become a Documents category).
        
Beagle Tray Applet (Srinivasa Ragavan)

        This is another piece of magic from the famous Srini.  This is a
        notification tray applet that lets you click, type, search.
        Very nice.  Right now it uses the same UI as Best, but Srini is
        working on creating a "miniview" mode for tiles, so that we can
        have a more compact view of the results for the applet.
        
Best robustness (Hari)

        Harinath added some robustness to Best, so that it prints an
        error in the event of the daemon not being present, or dying
        mid-query.  Even more amazingly, if the daemon comes back up at
        some point, the last query the user tried is re-issued and the
        results appear  This is pretty sweet.
        
        I also added a little link that you can click to start the
        daemon if it's not running.  The link is aware of whether or not
        you're running out of the source tree or out of an installed
        beagle, and runs the right binary, depending.
        
More robustness (Joe Shaw)

        Joe made Beagle impervious to failing backends, so that if a
        backend doesn't start up, Beagle can still allow queries.
        
Tomboy indexing (Christopher Orr)

        We now have incredible code from Christopher to allow Tomboy
        indexing.  This works incredibly well, and is impressive to see.
        Notes now show up in Best results like anything else.
        
        What's left is to add a D-BUS interface to Tomboy so that you
        can click a note and have it appear.  Trow gave this a start
        today, but was busy helping other people with their code and
        didn't get it finished yet.

Overall, the hackfest was a triumph.  Here are a few remaining tasks if
someone wants to pick them up:

Separate IM log browser

        We need a standalone tool that launches when you click on IM
        logs.  Krishnan started on this, but it's still undone.
        
Show presence in person tiles

        I added Galago packages to the nat.org open carpet server of
        earthly delights, but there are still no Galago# bindings; once
        these are in place, adding presence to person tiles should be
        trivial.
        
RSS Crawler in the daemon

        It'd be great if Beagle could index the blogs you read on a
        regular basis.
        
IMAP indexing

        We still can't search Evo IMAP feeds; this should be an easy fix
        when people use offline mode.  See the TODO file for more info.
        
beagle-kill
        
        To shutdown the daemon.
        
        
Okay!  To bed.

Night,
Nat