Many reasons to like, what's yours ?

Beagle 0.3.0 was released beginning of December. It is nearly 2 years since 0.2.0, more than 10 months since the last feature release and it has been about 2 weeks since then. In the mean time we identified some problems upgrade problems with 0.3.0 and released 0.3.1 and Mono released 1.2.6.

In contrast to 0.1.0 and 0.2.0, beagle-0.3.0 did not have any single major-impact change. But there were lots of small changes, all over the summer months and the months following them. It was getting increasingly difficult to handle all the small changes without going through the "Release early" trick and at some point we paused development, did a test release and then finally released what we have as a major release. I am personally expecting a fair share of bugs and regressions.

What are these small changes anyway ? I will leave out the invisible ones, some of which I have blogged about before, and only explain the ones that will directly impact your desktop usage.

There are 3 new backends: the Thunderbird backend (newly written, much better than the earlier one), the Opera history backend and the Nautilus metadata backend. There is also the TeX filter, one of our most demanded ones and new audio filter based on Taglib-sharp. There are new Firefox and Epiphany extensions which do a lot more than indexing browsing history and bookmarks.

The UI got some love; specially a bunch of useful options were added to beagle-settings like the backend selecion list. For obvious reasons, users should disable the backends they are never going to use.

One of the side effects of the beagle textcache previously was the creation of thousands of small cache files on the disk. People reported that the external fragmentation was wasting a lot of space. The textcache module was redesigned to minimize the fragmentation; I am sure you will appreciate the recovered space. We also compacted the external attributes; besides other benefits that will save some more space.

Two major enhancements were made to the query syntax, which is already quite rich. Date queries are now possible; date queries do not make complete sense without date range query, so that too is possible. And a new "filetype:" keyword was added e.g. to search for images use "filetype:image", to search among documents use "filetype:document" etc.

The major complains against beagle are constantly high CPU load, high memory usage and improper termination (or not exiting at all). The first two are well known and oft discussed. The third problem is not directly brought up, but have been found to be the reason upon close investigation. I gained valuable experience trying to find my way through the web of signals, threads and events in beagle code; a number of key issues were spotted and fixed. Oh, and the first two issues were also dealth with, as much as we could diagnose, but that is nothing new. It will sound funny, but a few of the high CPU and memory problems are direct results of some of our decisions that backfired. Some of them were fixed and the others being worked on.

2 experimental features were also added. One is a web interface to search beagle from Firefox (gecko based browsers really). You can also create standard bookmarks for common search terms. The neat thing about this web interface unlike the earlier webservices based one is that there is no heavy weight server running on beagle's side. This one communicates with beagled using BeagleClient XML based API and builds the entire GUI on the client side; a pure Web 2.0 AJAX/XSLT/CSS webapp (ok, these are some cheap buzzwords).

The other fancy feature is searching other beagle daemons over the network. Using Avahi you can even publish your beagle daemon or discover other beagle daemons in the network. We haven't quite figured out how to handle security, authenication and some other issues. So the feature is disabled by default and marked as experimental but I believe it can be used in some innovative way.

We received request from some distributions about global config files; useful for both distributions and sysadmins. Some useful global configuration settings would be to exclude certain directory from indexing for all users, adding or removing file ignore patterns from the default list, disabling of KDE backends by default in pure Gnome distributions. Some of the options were moved from the code to the config files, so that they can be set globally and overriden by individual users.

These are only some of the major ones.

Lastly, the reason I got excited about mono-1.2.6 is because it has some fixes and improvements that will be directly visible when using beagle.