path: root/NEWS

Tracker 0.6.90
============= (UNRELEASED)

  What's Changed?
  * Major re-factoring over the last 12 months for cleaner code.
  * Modular approach with:
     - libtracker-common 
       (common functions shared across all binaries)
     - libtracker-db     
       (database abstraction and manipulation API)
     - libtracker-data   
       (a higher level data get/set API)
     - libtracker-module
       (an API used by 3rd parties to index their content)
  * DBus re-factoring and use of GLib bindings (for maintainability).
    (The method names haven't changed, but the objects have, so the
     client applications will need to be updated).
  * Extractors are now run as an external process detached from the
    indexer to not crash the indexer for problematic files.
  * The utility applications have all been improved and use GOption
    for argument parsing.
  * Configuration is now more centralised and used by applications as
    well as the daemon/indexer.
  * File monitoring has been rewritten using GIO and libinotify:
  * GnomeVFS support dropped from the project.

  What's New?
  * Requirement for GLib 2.16.x.
  * Imported libinotify (for use in the daemon for file monitoring).
    (due to lack of MOVE event information from GIO).
  * Support for DBus introspection.
  * Support for removable media indexing (MMC, USB sticks).
  * Support for meta-data caching on removable devices
    (see http://live.gnome.org/MetadataOnRemovableDevices)
  * Support for searching with OR operations.
  * Support for XESAM (initial support only).
  * Added application dedicated to indexing (tracker-indexer).
  * Added estimated time remaining while indexing.
  * Added module API and framework for applications to add support for
    their media files to be indexed. 
  * Added utility applications:
    - tracker-unique   
      (searches for unique values with option RDF filters)
    - tracker-services 
      (lists all ontology services/properties)
    - tracker-info     
      (lists details known to tracker about a particular file)
  * Added unit tests for:
    - trackerd
    - tracker-indexer
    - tracker-extract
    - libtracker-common
    - libtracker-db
  * Added documentation for:
    - daemon/indexer design
    - libtracker-common
    - libtracker-module

  Missing Support
  * Index merging has been removed in this release due to lack of
    time to implementing it and with plans to redesign. SQLite FTS has
    the feature internally and will be used in future releases. This
    is noticeable only for very large data sets where a slowdown can be
    observed. 



Tracker 0.6.6
============= (03 Mar 2008)

  Applet
  * HIG fix for preference window.
  * Progress for index merges added.

  Tracker daemon
  * Fixed shutdown of daemon when paused to prevent hangs.
  * Fixed an unfinished final index merge step when next restarted.



Tracker 0.6.5
============= (27 Feb 2008)

  Applet
  * Removed popup window and replaced with tooltip displaying status
    and progress.
  * New Applet preferences to turn off animation/hide icon/set
    smart pause.
  * Smart pause feature which can auto-pause the Tracker daemon
    whenever the user presses a key or moves the mouse, thereby
    improving system responsiveness during indexing.
  * Annoying merge messages have now been removed.
  * Reindex option added.
  * About box added.
  * Now hidden if indexing is disabled.
  * Bugs with constant animation fixed.
  * Animation rate slowed right down so as to be less annoying.

  Tracker daemon
  * Temporary blacklisting of frequently changing files (they are
    indexed after one hour or on next restart of Tracker daemon).
    This prevents constant indexing from downloads and torrents.
  * More blacklisting of common tmp formats and vmware files.
  * Memory leak fixes.
  * Removed CPU-heavy corruption scan which can last long time and
    occurs on battery too at startup when tracker daemon was not
    previously shut down properly. Instead we now use bigger
    transactions with fsync on to prevent corruption in the first
    place (only slightly more disk IO is used during indexing as a
    result).
  * Fixed crashers.
  * Fixed D-Bus shutdown/reindex call.



Tracker 0.6.4
============= (11 Dec 2007)

  * Made indexing more robust by pausing if disk space is low or
    index grows too big.
  * Limit log file size to 10MB.
  * New Tracker Applet - animates when indexing, provides ability to
    pause indexing as well as viewing status and progress feedback
    from indexer, statistics, and notification warnings; it can
    also launch Tracker Preferences and Tracker Search Tool.
  * New power management options enable much better customization.
  * Ignored files fixes.
  * Deskbar/tracker integration fixes.
  * Made most prefs live and affect Tracker in real time; others
    will prompt for restart and/or reindex where necessary.
  * Shell script fixes
  * Fixed Imap bug with embedded Auth in URI.
  * Built-in corruption check and scan when Tracker is not shut down
    cleanly - prevents infinite looping.
  * Fix index deletions.
  * Many more bug fixes and stability improvements.



Tracker 0.6.3
============= (25 Sep 2007)

  * Fixed memory leaks.
  * New index merging which allows for much better performance and
    much less disk hogging I/O.
  * Battery throttling - Tracker now stops indexing when on battery.
  * Many more optimisations - transactions, use of O_NOATIME and
    posix_fadvise everywhere.
  * Check files exist before including in search results.
  * Fixed disabling of indexing option in tracker-preferences.
  * HIG fixes to tracker-preferences screen.
  * Fixed resetting of stats.

  note:
    This version will cause your hard drive to be re-indexed so
    that stats are fixed (previous version broke them).



Tracker 0.6.2
============= (25 Sep 2007)

  * New Sqlite-based indexer which utilises the new incremental blob
    I/O in sqlite 3.4.
  * Highly-optimised email indexing (up to 5x faster).
  * Dramatically reduced disk access and disk contention.
  * Indexer now pauses for a grace period when non-Tracker processes
    write to disk (providing changed files are being watched by
    Tracker) - minimises slowdowns when compiling or checking out
    source code.
  * Makes use of idle class disk IO scheduling if available.
  * Makes preliminary use of NO_ATIME (some disk access still uses
    fopen).
  * Fixed restore of user metadata on re-index (keywords are
    auto-restored).
  * Added increased number of (junk) files to automatically ignore.
  * Improved stopwords.
  * New Deskbar handler that uses the new Deskbar api (2.19+).
  * Fixed old Deskbar handler to remove race condition causing
    crashes.
  * Fixed a number of annoying bugs in email indexing and Tracker
    Preferences.

  note:
    This version will cause your hard drive to be re-indexed due to
    the new Sqlite indexer backend.


Tracker 0.6.1
============= (08 Aug 2007)

  * translations and bugfixes


Tracker 0.6.0 "better late than never"
============= (24 Jul 2007)

  * Evolution Emails (mbox/pop/imap) now indexed.
  * Gaim/Pidgin chat logs now indexed.
  * Applications now indexed.
  * New files indexed - all spreadsheets, csv (these require
    Gnumeric to be installed) and oo draw.
  * Vastly improved and new search UI using a sidebar for categories
    and a new metadata tile.
  * Tagging support in the UI.
  * New tracker-preferences UI for easy setting of prefs.
  * Added libtracker-gtk widget toolkit.
  * Now uses XDG directories.
  * Optimised triple store.
  * Handles multiple triple stores (files, emails and user data are
    all separate dbs).
  * New IDF based ranking algorithm.
  * XMP metadata support added.
  * Made use of async calls in tracker-search-tool to prevent it
    from freezing.
  * Added a 60 second delay before indexing to prevent slowdowns on
    desktop start-up.
  * Added support for crawling directories without watching overhead
    (useful for indexing source code without causing slowdowns when
     compiling).


Tracker 0.5.4 "Speed Daemon"
============= (26 Jan 2007)

  * Indexing at ludicrous speed - massively optimised indexing so
    its now 10x faster than previous version. Indexing speeds are
    now around 100 text files per second (which is about the
    maximum possible considering the I/O time to read 100 files from
    a hard drive).
  * Index while you work - now scheduled even better so it should
    never slow the system down whilst allowing users to work without
    being affected by or even noticing it.
  * Also provides additional --throttle command line parameter to
    customise throttling even further so no need to endure noisy
    fans or hot laptops while indexing.
  * New verbosity param to control how much data is shown on screen
    and in log.
  * Fixed MPlayer backend which is now used if gstreamer backend
    returns no metadata
  * Improved reaping of all spawned apps - no more zombies!
  * Improved mime and text file detection.
  * Added improved deskbar-handler.
  * Got Tracker to run nicely on FUSE based filesystems.


Tracker 0.5.3
============= (24 Dec 2006)

  * Fixed memory leaks when indexing (typical mem usage should now
    be ~6MB RSS when indexing large numbers of files).
  * New improved metadata engine now sports multiple values per
    metadata item and rdf style recursive metadata relationships.
  * Support for Dublin Core types (especially for metadata
    relationships).
  * Changed command line options for trackerd to be similiar to
    other programs.
  * Metadata names now to reflect rdf style syntax (Eg DC:Keywords).
  * Improved indexing of numeric data so that only meaningful
    numbers are indexed (IE must contain 5 or more consecutive
    numbers to be indexable).
  * Improved indexing of filenames so that hyphens and underscores
    are used as word breaks to create a delimited filename in
    addition to the full filename.
  * Improved snippet generator to start/end on a word break if
    possible.


Tracker 0.5.2
============= (21 Nov 2006)

  * Now has l10n/i18n support.
  * Added timeout to all external processes and metadata extractors
    used by Tracker.
  * Added missing OpenOffice templates to our filters.
  * Fixed filters to use different packages like w3m for indexing
    html.
  * Fixed Debian build and added new packages for data files and
    translations.
  * Imporved t-s-t and made snippets wordwrap, made snippets async,
    used Tracker's mime facility, improved highlighting and fixed
    crasher.
  * Limited tracker-extract's memory usage using setrlimit.
  * Added desktop files for tracker-search-tool.


Tracker 0.5.1
============= (07 Nov 2006)

  * Inlined a threadsafe version of sqlite to prevent common errors
    like content not being indexed. This can be overriden for those
    with a threadsafe version of SQlite.
  * New Gstreamer-based audio/video extractor on by default.
  * Made extractors more robust.
  * Fixed a number of compiler warnings.
  * Tidied up the tracker-search-tool to have buttons more evenly-sized
  * Fixed a few leaks and made the D-Bus interface more robust.
  * Imporved IOprio detection.


Tracker 0.5.0
============= (25 Oct 2006)

  * Completely new backend that has been moved from Mysql to the
    nimble Sqlite database and QDBM inverted word index.
  * New tracker-search-tool GUI which allows you to search for your
    files in a google-like fashion with results depicted with
    google-style search snippets.
  * Revamped Rdf Query engine.
  * New lighter design with big dependencies like libextractor
    having been dropped in favour of lighter and optional metadata
    extractors.
  * Added new extractors that can use Totem or MPlayer.
  * New options to tune Tracker for your system. We now have a
    --enable-low-memory setting for use with computers with less
    RAM and a --turbo mode for those  who want indexing to take
    place as fast as possible.
  * New snowball stemmers have been integrated into Tracker to
    provide some of the highest quality open source stemming around.
  * New language-specific stopword lists to prevent indexng of
    common words (which are of little value).
  * Can optionally make use of Pango word breaking for full
    internationalisation support.


Tracker 0.0.4 "Now indexing at Warp speed"
============= (16 May 2006)

  * Hugely optimised indexing when many files are waiting to be
    indexed (especially when you first run trackerd).
  * Mass queueing of files no longer blocks the main thread, meaning
    super fast searches can still be performed during heavy indexing.
  * Eliminated CPU bottlenecks and improved thread synchronisations
    so Tracker now hits the ground running when indexing (approx
    500+ files indexed per minute on inotify-enabled systems).
  * Extended metadata support for more Exif fields.
  * Added more service types.
  * Imporved build and support for FC5 (includes RPMs).
  * Redesigned Database around version 5 of the *embedded*
    in-process MySQL database library.
  * Now uses the auto-repair facility provided by MySQL to
    automatically repair damaged database files so you need never
    worry about losing your precious data.
  * Moved virtually all DB logic into stored procedures which
    provides a clean seperation of DB logic and application logic.
  * Added support for parsing dates in various formats including
    conversion to/from ISO 8601 format
  * Fixed MSWord filter to prevent looping (WvText causes inotify to
    report file write change causing endless looping).
  * Redesigned DB structure to be more generic and service orientated
  * Added support for service types (first class objects) to DB.
  * Cleaned up code warnings and fixed potential crasher.
  * Fixed issues with argv handling.
  * Fixed build issue for Fedora Core 5.


Tracker 0.0.3
============= (29 Mar 2006)

  * Made D-Bus interface more generic
  * Corrected search results of hyphenated search terms.
  * Added support for limiting no. of hits for searches.
  * Added optional support for sorting search results by relevance
    score.
  * A few minor bug fixes (Updating file name metadata correctly
    during move, correcting use of hyphenated search terms).
  * Streamlined the inlined version of libextractor and improved
    build system and fixed bug in previous version which prevented
    compilation of the inlined version.


Tracker 0.0.2
============= (27 Feb 2006)

  * Full inotify support (only compatible with Linux kernels 2.6.13
    or higher) with optimisations for detected moves.
  * Fallback to FAM/GAMIN and manual polling for non-Linux and/or
    non-inotify systems.
  * Improved build system which allows you to specify which file
    monitoring backend to use.
  * Valgrind'ed to remove all leaks.


16 Jan 2006
  *	Added support for Tracker as a Nautilus Search Backend.


05 Jan 2006 
  * Added polling mechanism to watch files in absence of FAM/iNotify
	or when FAM/iNotify watch limits have been exceeded.

13 Dec 2005 
  * Imported Tracker into GNOME CVS.


08 Dec 2005
  * Pre-release of Tracker launched.

15 Sep 2005
  * Tracker project started.