Contents |
Beagle Newsletter Issue 1 - 21 September 2004
Welcome to the first Beagle and Dashboard development newsletter. Contained is the latest news on what has been going on with these two projects and how things are progressing.
Don't know what Beagle is?
First, welcome to the world of bleeding edge software development! For the basics of the project visit the beagle homepage and the wiki.
Recent IRC/mailing list discussion
Help!
Much of the discussion as of late is dealing with getting dependencies working to allow Beagle to do its thing. Helpful assistance has been provided via the mailing list in the following threads: here, here and here. Also, the unofficial wiki has become a popular place for instructions and tips on how to get Beagle set up.
What's with this daemon/client thing?
As the number of applications that deal with Beagle has grown (Best, Nautilus, panel-applet, GtkFileChooser?...), the need for an easy way to connect and search Beagle has become painfully obvious. The solution is to build a unified C# interface in which all the applications can connect to Beagle in a simple and similar manner. As a result, dbus interaction is the same for all applications. The main change is that to interact with Beagle, you must now run the client 'beagled' to act as the daemon.
Is Dashboard dead?
Despite popular opinion, the Dashboard project is not dead, but development has been paused. Lots of the burden of finding related metadata has been taken from Dashboard and put into Beagle's powerful Lucene.NET indexer. When we started Dashboard last year, we had some really great ideas, but we lacked a lot of the infrastructure to build much more than a prototype. This year, we took a step back and started to build the search, association and metadata infrastructure we need to do Dashboard right: Beagle. As Beagle becomes more mature, a development effort will be put forward to reconstruct Dashboard around Beagle.
Dbus, Dbus, Dbus...
Beagle is in the process of moving to a daemon/client structure and is doing so with the help of dbus-sharp. Dbus-sharp is currently found on the freedesktop.org CVS tree and information about setting dbus up can be found on the Beagle Install Guide.
What to expect in upcoming releases / who's working on what?
Live Queries
Beagle is now able to perform a 'live' update of a query. So as you work, your query will be updated to reflect the latest of information. For example, if new files are created that match the search criteria, they will immediately appear in the results list.
Kernel Event Layer
Robert's (rml) kernel event layer is a kernel patch that will alert other applications of certain events, such as mounts/unmounts. This is currently in the -mm sources and is planned to be in the 2.6.10 kernel.
inotify
inotify is a kernel feature that is ment to signal the change of a file. When beagle is alerted of this change, the file can be re-indexed.
How can I help
You can download beagle either through gnome cvs or you can get it from the open-carpet repository on nat.org. Instructions can be found from the mailing list or from the wiki.
Helpful links
Message from editor
If this newsletter proved helpful or you would like to contribute to the next issue please email Joe Gasiorek.
