Zeitgeist Framework 0.3.0 "Voodoo Resonance"

On behalf of the Zeitgeist team I am proud to announce our first development release, Zeitgeist 0.3.0, leading up to what will be our stable series which will be 0.4. It is our intent to aim for a 1.0 release as soon as we feel good about the stable series, but that is still a bit in the future. Now that we've crossed the initial hurdle in the rewrite we expect the release cycle to be much shorter than this one, although we have not settled on something strict yet.

As many of you know the bulk work on this release was done in the Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolzano. Since we came back we been busy little bees polishing it up and fixing bugs - trying not to flame eachothers too much when discussing the designs :-) Working face to face in Bolzano gave us a unique chance to really discuss things through and get to the bottom of the details. This will also affect other develops a bit since...

We were bad boys and decided to change both our internal database structures as well as our public DBus API. Sorry - but after long discussions we all agreed that this was for the best. The new design is leaps and bounds better than the old one. This means that you both have to give up on your old log database, and accept that there are no GUI written for the new API just yet. This is being worked on as you read this though!

Something that might come as a shock to some other developers is that we decided not to store annotations and bookmarks within Zeitgeist. This should be done in Tracker or some other semantic metadata storage[1]. Zeitgeist answers only when and how data was accessed, but stores no information about the current state of the metadata. We will be working very closely with Tracker from now on since 0.7 is a blessed dependency for GNOME 2.30. Congrats to the Tracker Devs.

You can download the release from: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download

The NEWS entry reads: [see below]

Cheers,

Mikkel

[1]: There have been talk about defining (and implementing) a very simple DBus API for storing semantic annotations (bookmarks, tags, comments, ratings, etc). In our internal speak such a service is called a Repository. Tracker or Soprano would expose this API in most cases, but on platforms where they are not available the simple Repository implementation would be most handy. This being said, it is currently not a high priority to implement a Repository, there are alternatives ready in Tracker and Soprano.