Pierre Östlund

I just committed some code to trunk that removes the need for any external libraries or tools needed when building the Thunderbird extension (other than the ones needed by beagle self of course). So, if you could build beagle before you probably can now as well. Try it out and give me some feedback here

A small disclaimer: The update was pretty extensive and I might have missed to update a variable name, function call or something like that. I’ve tried the extension out a bit and it seems to be solid. But I just wanted to get this out.

The Thunderbird backend and extension have now been merged with trunk and the project is now officially marked as finished (with the exception of bug fixes and future work of course). Now is the time where I need all eager testers to find bugs and issues for me to solve. Make sure to check trunk out if you are interested. I have updated the build system to enable Thunderbird support if the thunderbird development files are available. So you should check if the Thunderbird backend is enabled when building. Otherwise you are probably missing the mentioned thunderbird development files (usually called [mozilla-]thunderbird-dev in most distributions).

I want to point out that the latest version of the extension, 0.1.2, fixes a bunch of issues. Yesterday I realized that I had forgot to check in an update to a locale file. This rendered the new error reporting system that I had implemented before useless. I’ve fixed this now and you should probably try the latest extension out if you had problems with the old version just keeping shutting itself down all the time.

Here’s the latest XPI for all you lazy people out there (nothing will end up in beagle until you build beagle with Thunderbird support enabled though; just installing the extension is pretty useless):

Beagle extension for Thunderbird v0.1.2

In my last status report email I wrote something like this (TODO list for this week):

• Add an about box
• Make the “remove a folder from beagle’s index” work
• Ensure that the main loop only runs when there’s something to index
• Clean up the extension a bit and add better error explanations
• At least try to fix the threading issue in the “unindex” dialog window
• Hack around the “moving” and “removal from trash” issues until we have proper support for this [moving should have been “renaming”]
• Fix bugs

I have completed most of the tasks listed. The major one left is the second dot and I still don’t know why my code does not work. It should in my eyes. Well, well… Bug fixing is the next big thing and that’s basically what I have left before this project ends.

lThere’s some notes that I want to add though:

• Currently there’s no way for me to fix the “renaming” and “removal from trash” issues as there are no APIs available today for dealing with this. The functions needed are there but they are never called (stub functions). My code should work as soon as these functions are implemented. I know for a fact that they will be implemented but I don’t know when they will appear in Thunderbird.
• I have updated beagle-search to work with Thunderbird. Unfortunately Thunderbird lacks a good way of displaying data and I don’t know how to fix this right know. A solution is evidently checked into the 3.x branch but I think that some temporary solution is needed here.
• No address book support so far. I might add support for it later but it will not be during SoC. The address book has an entirely different API and it would require more work than I have time for (school is starting pretty soon).

Seems like opening emails from the command line will need some attention from me right now. So I’ll get started on that and see how it goes. And oh, I know that I said that I wouldn’t publish any more XPIs but I’ll publish the latest one any way on request (note that I’ve bumped the version number).

Beagle extension for Thunderbird v0.1.1

Update: I have now implemented basic command line support in the extension, which basically means that you can open your Thunderbird data from beagle-search. It’s still experimental but hopefully it’ll work for you. Enjoy!

Latest beagle extension for Thunderbird