I havn't been catching up with beagle-tracker-mono world since then. To be honest, I have long stopped following /. and Linux news altogether. I couldn't get myself to unsubscribe from beagle mailing-list though, even though I was convinced within a year no one in the world would be using beagle any more and there will never be any email in that list. It was just matter of time.
Therefore, imagine my surprise to see the following recent thread in the mailing list. It was too nice and warming to read the posts once-twice-thrice. The stability and versatility that we aimed and delivered, is surprisingly, still relevant. Maybe I should title this post as "How he is still loved"
Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:53:42 +0100
Dear beagle hackers,since the mailing list is inactive I fear that beagle is now ultimately abandoned. Is this the case? If so, this really makes me sad. I have been using beagle daily for a number of years and I still find that there is no better desktop search available on Linux. Tracker is a disappointment. It supports very few data sources, is a cpu and memory hog, it is buggy, and its search results are very poor in quality, and I don't really see it making progress either. I got so used to beagle for quickly finding e-mail and files that I was saddened to see that Debian completely removed it from the archives, because development has stopped. Isn't there anyone anywhere willing to take over? There has been so much effort invested into beagle. In the end it was really stable, reliable and usable, that just letting it rot is such a wasteful thing to do...
Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:46:20 -0600
I don't think anybody is actively working on beagle, but I wouldn't call it dead. It's still used by many people, and we're at least keeping it runnable -- eg we had an update to adapt to new Mono.Sqlite APIs upstream. Feel free to work on it!
Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:06:13 +0100
I would love to, but unfortunately I am in no way qualified to do so. It is good to hear that people are still using it, However, at least for Debian users this has become very difficult since it was removed from the repositories. Has it been updated to work with recent version of Evolution?
Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:28:41 -0500
On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 13:53 +0100, Johannes Rohr wrote: > Dear beagle hackers, > since the mailing list is inactive I fear that beagle is now ultimately > abandoned. Is this the case? If so, this really makes me sad. > I have been using beagle daily for a number of years and I still find > that there is no better desktop search available on Linux. > Tracker is a disappointment. It supports very few data sources, is a cpu > and memory hog, it is buggy, and its search results are very poor in > quality, and I don't really see it making progress either. I feel the same way; I'd hoped Tracker could serve as a replacement for Beagle but to call it a disappointment is an understatement. Score a big one for the anti-Mono-FUD-monster [funny they used to go on-an-on that Beagle was slow because it used Mono... then Beagle got fast and Tracker still devours gobs of CPU to produce essentially no result]. But in Tracker's defense Evolution has been changing significantly in the past few revisions so Beagle doesn't work with it anymore either. In time hopefully Evolution will settle down again and the Tracker integration will improve. Some really nice improvements are being made to Evolution. > I got so used to beagle for quickly finding e-mail and files that I was > saddened to see that Debian completely removed it from the archives, > because development has stopped. Isn't there anyone anywhere willing to > take over? There has been so much effort invested into beagle. In the > end it was really stable, reliable and usable, that just letting it rot > is such a wasteful thing to do... If there are no developers that is what happens. Pointing out that there "should be" developers doesn't make them magically appear.
Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:47:15 -0500Then there were posts about an alternate desktop search yada yada yada which I am skipping. Though, one thing should be kept in mind - one shouldn't apples and oranges. Beagle is not a file-system indexer. There are plenty of other tools to do that, and the simplest file system indexer can be written in less than 100 lines (of any modern programming language).
>> I feel the same way; I'd hoped Tracker could serve as a replacement for> Beagle but to call it a disappointment is an understatement.
Ditto. I have continued to be disappointed by Tracker. I've completely
removed it from my systems as it was actively blocking other
applications. More trouble that it was worth.
Beagle was always very un-intrusive and always gave me great search
results.
Sad that it's moribund. :-(
There is of course a file system indexer built on beagle that can be used to compare against existing file system indexers - it is called blocate and I believe, is shipped alongside beagle (in distros still packaging beagle). Let us bow once again to the stability and versatility - blocate is merely a wrapper shell script calling the regular beagle commands.
