Better late than never

Beagle 0.3.4 was released into the wild last week. We tried to fix the build problems (new Gnome-sharp, Mono 1.9, missing files from last release) but building Beagle with Ndesk-DBus 0.5.2 remained broken, as per tradition.

Other than that this version builds nicely with Mono 1.9 and contains #ifdef-ed code to use the Mono.Unix.UnixSignal API when built with Mono 1.9. That should ensure that beagled and index-helper will quit when asked to quit. Yes, this is the 21st century.

There is a lot of mapping in Beagle and a lot of them are hardcoded. We are gradually moving them to user configurable files. The config files were moved out earlier; in 0.3.4 we have moved out the query mapping (mapping "ext:html" to right internal property name). If you want to add a mapping for some property you repeatedly query, just add it to the local ~/.beagle/query-mapping.xml

I added another handy tool to use Beagle as updatedb/locate. Use beagle-build-index or beagled to create indexes (like updatedb). And then use beagle-static-query to query the indexes (like locate) - no long running daemon beagled has to be running.

E.g. I created an index for system files in /usr/bin, /bin and other global directories (the --disable-filtering is to disable filtering file contents since here is only care about the file names and such),

$ beagle-build-index --recursive --disable-filtering --target ~/.systembeagle /usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/ /bin/ /etc /usr/local/etc/

Then I could query just like locate,

$ beagle-static-query --add-static-backend ~/.systembeagle 'net*' --backend none

(--backend none is to tell beagle to not search any other backends). I could have added ~/.systembeagle to beagle using beagle-config so that I dont have to add this path everytime or I could have even created an alias for this.

Why do this when locate/updatedb already does it ? Because I can :). Ok, I actually use this to search monodocs. I am not a big fan of this mouse, point, click business and I stick to the terminal with mod and monop2 at my disposal. These tools are great once you know the fully qualified name of the method or the class. Use this jack-of-all-trade beagle.

Step-1: Enable the system wide monodoc index. Its one of the crawl-rules shipped with beagle but disabled by default.

Step-2: Let cron build it or you run the cron job yourself. Building the monodoc index takes time though. Definitely longer than any special indexer for monodoc files. But thats only a one time cost.

Step-3: Use beagle-static-query. You can also use phrases and wildcards '*' and search only in methods or classes or properties (just look in the returned fields and use beagle property query).