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Beagle Newsletter Issue 4 - 29 November 2004
Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you're new to the project you can read up about it on our website: http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle
Release
This past week saw a new release (0.0.3) of Beagle. There have been a great many changes since the last release. Jon has assembled a short list at the end of the release announcement: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2004-November/msg00071.html
Roadmap
The core Beagle hackers met on the phone a couple of weeks ago and put together a list of features and issues that we want to have implemented for a first "working release." This release has been named milestone 1.
Each of the tasks that is part of milestone 1 has been created as a bugzilla bug in bugzilla.gnome.org.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=beagle&version=milestone+1
The main new features in milestone 1 will be:
Reduced memory usage. Beagle today consumes several hundred megs of RAM under heavy use. It is not clear why. The team has been looking into the problem.
In the past, Beagle has acted as a query aggregator for diverse backend search tools. For example, even though Beagle does not index your mail itself, when you do a search it will query Evolution through the Camel messaging library, and combine the Camel search results with the other Beagle search results. It does this also for Google searches.
We have made the decision that all local data and cacheable remote data must be indexed by Beagle in its primary Lucene index. This will make searches much faster and will give us much more consistent relevance sorting.
And when it comes to implementing metadata interfaces in Beagle, this will ensure that we have a consistent location for all metadata (e.g., instead of the sender of a message being stored in a mailbox file somewhere, it will be cached in Beagle's Lucene index, like everything else).
This decision applies in particular to mail, address book, and calendar.
Full support for indexing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
Indexing files that appear on your Windows partition if it is mounted in Linux.
Integrated presence in search results through Galago.
We are shooting for January to have milestone 1 complete. This will roughly correspond with both GNOME 2.10 and SUSE 9.3.
Naturally, the Beagle team is open to contributions and discussion of features that are not in this list.
Hacking
While Jon Trowbridge has been focusing on getting the 0.0.3 release out many things were being coded.
Windows Port
Fredrik Hedberg has been working on getting a working port of Beagle to the Windows platform. Without a port of D-BUS to Windows, Fredrik also made the beginning of the Beagle networking code. Great work!
Screenshot: http://users.avafan.com/fredrik/activity/archive/2004/Nov-26.html
In the past Beagle has queryed Evolution for results. Joe Shaw has been working on having Beagle index the mail instead of relying on Evolution. This strategy is not only faster but improves the accuracy of the results. However, this results in the inclusion of a new dependency for Beagle, GMime. This dependency can be currently found in GNOME CVS, but there will be more news about this soon.
inotify
Robert Love has made some new inotify kernels. The new kernels fix many of the queue overflow problems that previous kernels were experiencing. Packages can be found here:
http://primates.ximian.com/rml/kernel-rml/suse-92-i586/ or the
patch itself at:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/inotify/v2.6/0.16/
MS Office Filters
Veerapuram Varadham has been working on improving the filters for various Microsoft Office file types. Stability
Jon Trowbridge, Joe Shaw and Dave Camp have been working on improving the stability of the Beagle daemon. Great work, it is nice to be able to keep beagled running for long periods of time. Images
Tuomas Kuosmanen has been working on many images for the Beagle project. They look awesome, thanks!
Project
Patches
Previously patches have been sent to the list (dashboard-hackers@gnome.org) for review, however, this has led to many patches getting missed or skipped over. For the future, please file a Bug on Bugzilla (bugzilla.gnome.org) and put the patch there.
Freedesktop.org
Fd.o has undergone server problems in the last few weeks. Because of this there is some differences in the new cvs/svn servers. Information should be on the wiki (www.beaglewiki.org) about how to access the servers.
Problems?
The troubleshooting Beagle page on the wiki has proved to be a great source for helping set up beagle. If you overcome a problem when setting up or using beagle, please add it to the wiki: http://beaglewiki.org/index.php/Troubleshooting%20Beagle
As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe Gasiorek at joe.gasiorek@gmail.com
