ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.6

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.6.

Today is the second anniversary of the initial checkin of Beagle to
GNOME CVS.  I'd like to thank everyone[1] who has supported and
contributed to Beagle over the past two years.  Without you, it would
not be the great piece of software it is today.

Version 0.2.6 is a bug fix release: it fixes problems launching shell
scripts from filters and the beagle-search UI, removes a buggy
workaround for a Mono memory leak, and fixes a problem introduced in
0.2.5 with beagle-crawl-system and some versions of su.

This version requires Mono 1.1.13.5 or newer.


OUR MANY URLS
-------------

To download the 0.2.6 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

Beagle was initially (and briefly) called Dewey:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2004-April/msg00030.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,
audio and video 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, Konqueror browsing history, system
documentation, and many others.  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 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 1.1.13.5 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:
* GMime 2.2.1
* Evolution-sharp 0.10.2 or 0.11.1
* 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 0.2.5
-------------------

Daemon/Infrastructure:
* Don't always redirect stdin/stdout/stderr and close them if we
  don't want them in the first place.  Fixes a problem where
  shell scripts wouldn't launch.  (Joe Shaw)
* Only set timestamps on files if the backend hasn't already
  set them.  (Debajyoti Bera)
* Allow filters and backends to register mappings between query
  keywords and property names.  (Bera)
* Back out the buggy Mono leak workaround and just require Mono
  1.1.13.5.  (Joe)

Backends:
* Store the date in the indexable's timestamp instead of using a
  dc:date property in the various feed backends.  (Bera)
* Strip HTML tags from Gaim logs so that they don't show up in
  beagle-search anymore.  (Bera)
* Ignore all special files in the file system backend, not just
  symlinks.  (Joe)

Filters:
* Add a package base class for EBuild, RPM, and deb filters.  (Bera)
* Add a Debian package filter.  (Kevin Kubasik)
* Resync entagged-sharp with upstream, which includes the new Ogg
  Vorbis mime type.  (Daniel Drake)

UI:
* Add a calendar tile to the build.  (Joe)
* When running in icon mode, change the Exit menu item to Close.
  (Lukas Lipka)
* Add Escape and Ctrl-W accelerators for closing the window.  (Lukas)
* Use the long date instead in the details pane for IM logs and mail
  messages.  (Lukas)
* Update the description and site fields with the correct properties
  in the RSS feed tile.  (Lukas)
* Various layout fixes in different tiles.  (Lukas)
* Fix an incorrect "From" label in emails that you send.  (Max Wiehle)

Tools:
* Move the -s argument before the username in beagle-crawl-system to
  appease some versions of su.  (Joe)
* Don't hardcode the beagle-settings size, just set a default size.
  (Joe)

Bindings:
* Add the indexable service calls to the C API.  (Bera)

Translations:
* Fix a markup bug in the Hungarian translation.  (Joe)
* Fix a typo in the Czech translation.  (Stanislav Brabec)
* Updated Dutch translation.  (Tino Meinen)
* Updated German translation.  (Hendrik Brandt)


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.


[1] Jon Trowbridge, Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, Daniel Drake, Fredrik
Hedberg, Lukas Lipka, Debajyoti Bera, Veerapuram Varadhan, Dan
Winship, Robert Love, Chris Lahey, Tuomas Kuosmanen, Ben Maurer,
Brandon Hale, JP Rosevear, Luis Villa, Dave Camp, Joe Gasiorek, Anders
Carlsson, Mikael Hallendal and Imendio, Rafael Slinckx, Larry Ewing,
Alex Graveley, Christopher Orr, Jim Krehl, Garrett LeSage, Jakub
Steiner, Vijay K. Nanjundaswamy, Adam Lofts, Adam Weinberger,
Alexander Macdonald, Alexander Shopov, Amanpreet Singh Alam, Anthony
Batchelor, Arangel Angov, Boris Peterbarg, Carl-Emil Lagerstedt,
Chao-Hsiung Liao, Chris Schneider, Christian Laireiter, Christian
Persch, Christian Rose, Christophe Merlet, Christopher Aillon, Clytie
Siddall, Damodharan R, Daniel Naber, Daniel Nylander, David Richards,
Dennis Cranston, Dennis Snell, Edward Cho, Enver Altin, Francisco
Javier Fernandez, Frank Arnold, Funda Wang, Gabor Kelemen, Garrett
Smith, Gary Ekker, Harish Krishnaswamy, Hendrik Brandt, Ignacio Casal
Quinteiro, Ilkka Tuohela, Ivan Stojmirov, Jack Miller, Jakub Friedl,
Jakub Steiner, James Ogley, James Vipond, Jean-Yves Lefort, Jonas
Klingstedt, Jordi Mas i Hernandez, Josep Puigdemont, Joshua Nichols,
Kang Jeong-Hee, Kevin Breit, Kevin Kubasik, Kjartan Maraas, Kostas
Papadimas, Krzysztof Rosiński, Kwok-Koon Cheung, Kyle Ambroff, LaMont
Jones, Larry Reaves, Lasse Bang Mikkelsen, Leonid Kanter, Lluís
Pàmies, Luca Ferretti, Marijn Ros, Mario Manno, Martin Willemoes
Hansen, Matthew Garrett, Max Wiehle, Maxim Dziumanenko, Michael
Dominic K, Michal Kastelik, Miguel Cabrera, Nagappan Alagappan,
Nicolas Trangez, Nikos Charonitakis, Øivind Hoel, Pat Double, Paul
Betts, Raja R Harinath, Raphael Higino, Richard Dawe, Rich Midwinter,
Robert Van Gorkom, Robinson Rodrigo Maure, Rodrigo Marcos Fombellida,
Rodrigo Moya, Rodrigo Sancho Senosiain, Rostislav Raykov, Ryan
Skadberg, Saravana Prabhu, Shobith Alva, Sivaiah Nallagatla, Sreekanth
G, Srinivasa Ragavan, Stanislav Brabec, Stephen Solka, Subodh Soni,
Sylvain Goletto, Takeshi Aihana, Terance Edward Sola, Tino Meinen,
Todd Berman, Tom von Schwerdtner, Urko Fernandez, Uwe Hermann, Vaclav
Slavik, Vincent van Adrighem, Vishravars Ramasubramanian, Vladimer
Sichinava, Vladimir Petkov, Wojciech Polak, Wouter Bolsterlee, Yair
Hershkovitz, Young-Ho Cha, Zafar, Žygimantas Beručka, Арангел Ангов
and anyone else I may have accidentally missed.