Pierre Östlund’s new Thunderbird extension for Beagle has just landed in the trunk. Pierre is one of our Google Summer of Code students this year, and he’s been doing fantastic work this summer. After a false start initially in trying to do the parsing of the Mork files on disk directly (a method that was tried with Beagle previously and given up on because of its memory usage) he decided to take the approach of building an extension to Thunderbird itself, which sends the message data to Beagle. This has been suggested before by various people and appears to be the approach taken by Google Desktop for Linux for Thunderbird as well. The downside is that it means that Thunderbird must be running to index your mail, but the upside is that it actually works. At this point, it’s mostly polish and bug fixing, so give it a try and let us know how it works.
Meanwhile, our other two projects: a new Firefox extension by Tao Fei and a Beagle/Xesam adapter by Arun Raghavan are also going quite well and will likely be merged in by the end of the summer.
dBera has also been working on merging in some projects from last summer as well: networked indexing that Kyle Ambroff and Alexis Christoforides… obviously this has been on the todo list for some time but hasn’t gotten the love it’s needed. While I don’t think it’ll land in time for a 0.3.0 release, it will probably follow shortly thereafter.
Speaking of 0.3.0, we need people to test out the code from SVN trunk and report any problems they see with it. We’ve fixed a lot of issues people have seen with indexing, including the irritating loop people have seen (and which Thomas blogged about) in which a shortage of inotify watches combined with the higher speed indexing that kicks in when the screensaver is on which meant that unchanged directories are crawled over and over. We’ve also added index verification so that that an index is no longer purged if a stale lock file is left behind (in an attempt to be “better safe than sorry”). Maybe some people can help us out by building packages for the various distros, particularly Ubuntu.