Hi!
It’s that time again. That’s right, Beagle release time! Beagle 0.0.12 is out.
In the past, I’ve come to say, “this version of Beagle is the most stable yet.” I’m not going to say that this time. Which is not to say that it isn’t stable — it’s certainly been quite good for me in my heavy testing the last few days, and there have been tons and tons of bugs fixed — but the focus on this release has been features. Unfortunately not really screenshot, eye-candy features, but important ones nonetheless. They include:
- The ability to run without extended attributes - This means it is now (theoretically) possible to run on filesystems like Reiser4 and NFS. They will be much, much slower (especially NFS) than their extended attribute counterparts, but at least it’ll run, right? Obviously, we still very strongly recommend you use EAs.
- System (read-only) indexes - Another big boon to NFS users. A new tool has been added, beagle-build-index, which creates an index based on a path you give it, and quits. Administrators can set up cron jobs to create indexes nightly for NFS users. It could be used for indexing all the files on the system, a la updatedb. You could have it index some subset of your files, like docbook documentation. The possibilities are endless!
- libbeagle - Yes, a C API which any application can use to add Beagle support to their applications. It obviously needs a running Beagle daemon, but it doesn’t require any Mono dependency on the applications themselves. Integration with Nautilus is on the way.
- Improvements to the filter architecture - Filters can now create their own items to index, and filters can now failover, allowing multiple filters to handle files of a certain type. (The pesky text/xml problem!)
- Email attachments are indexed - Because of the filtering changes, we now index all of your email attachments! Very exciting.
- Maildir filter - Again, because of the filtering changes, maildirs are now indexed (including attachments). Mailers which handle them — like KMail — now open them.
… and of course all kinds of bug fixes in just about every nook of the code. So maybe this is the most stable release yet. Read the release notes for a full rundown.