Grab the 3rd of the third

I announced the release of Beagle 0.3.3 today. It is one of those releases with lots of features here and there which just makes me nervous. I found a problem (which incidentally was uncovered when we started using Sqlite prepared statements couple of weeks ago) today during. I quickly identified the problem and fixed it but I am hoping everything else works out OK with this one.

Apart from using Sqlite prepared statements, which should show some speed improvements during running beagle-build-index, there are few other goodies as well. Beagle-search includes a menu option to view the current index information. I would have liked it better if it kept refreshing but this is better than nothing.

Searching documentation is now enabled in beagle-search. It used to be disabled by default in the early days because apparently it returned a lot of results and messed be Best. The situation is better now but not by much; so you have to pass --search-docs to beagle-search to ask it to search the documentation index. That aside, system wide manpage index is now enabled by default and that includes lzma compressed manpages (so Mandriva users like yours truly will be extremely delighted). Beagle search happily searches manpages and it is a real pleasure to use it instead of man -k.

Another real pleasure is being able to create Qt GUI using C#. Its feels very good and I ended up creating beagle-setting-qt, a Qt GUI for beagle-settings. I never added the bindings for the new beagle-config to libbeagle. So I had to amend my fault by giving KDE users some GUI for beagle-settings.

You also get a fake implementation of searching in a directory, one of the popular requests. You can either search inside a directory by giving its full path or by giving a word in the directories name. One catch is that the search is not recursively under the directory but only in its contents.

Sadly almost all the currently known problems with beagle are outside our control. Fortunately, most of the problems in these dependent libraries or suites are fixed and will be released soon. It is surprising how bugs in these external programs, generally corner cases when used alone, are triggered when using beagle. A long running application for desktop users has to cover a lot of bad ground to be even slightly respectable.

If this release goes well, then we might try to fix all the horribly hacky property names (based on our own ontology) and come out with a 0.4.0. I am also hoping to merge the RDF branch to trunk before that. I should really blog about the RDF branch sometime; the experiment to overlay an RDF store on beagle's data is nearing a sure success.