Beagle 0.2.14 Released

Beagle 0.2.14 is out! Beagle is a desktop-independent service for indexing and searching your data. The Beagle daemon transparently monitors your data and updates the index to reflect any changes. On an inotify-enabled system, these updates happen more-or-less in real time.

Beagle can extract information from your file system; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KMail emails and their attachements; Evolution, Thunderbird, and KAddressbook addressbooks; Evolution calendars; Gaim and Kopete instant messenger conversations; feeds from several RSS aggregators; Tomboy, KNotes, and Labyrinth notes; Konqueror browsing history; system documentation; and more. Beagle also indexes tags on your photos from F-Spot and Digikam. Beagle also provides Firefox and Epiphany extensions that index web pages in real-time as the user visits them.

This version has a lot of great stuff in it:

• A new archive filter which indexes zip files, tarballs, and individual gzip and bzip files. We also index the contents of these files, so you can find data inside those archives.
• Improvements to the UI, such as the total number of matched documents, and a message letting users know that their data is in the process of being indexed. (I previously wrote about the latter.)
• Support for the XDG autostart specification. We had been shipping this in the SUSE distributions for some time, but now that GNOME 2.14 has been out for a while, we’re now supporting it upstream.
• Better integration with profiling tools like heap-shot, to make fixing memory leaks easier. Also additional debugging tools, to find bugs in indexing certain files.
• Greatly reduced memory usage. Heap-shot has helped me find leaks in our code, and in addition to the great gains we made in 0.2.12 for startup memory size, this release goes a long way to keeping the memory usage fairly steady over time. There is still work to do here. In particular, there are some obvious hotspots in the Evolution and Thunderbird backends that we’ll be tackling for the next release.
• And as always, lots of bug fixes.

As always, go to the Beagle wiki to find out all the info.