Pinot
Copyright 2005-2009 Fabrice Colin <fabricecolin at users dot berlios dot de>
http://pinot.berlios.de/


1. What is Pinot
2. Upgrading from previous versions
3. Available engines
4. Indexes
5. Indexing and monitoring
6. Searching
7. Viewing cached results
8. File formats
9. File patterns
10. Digging deeper
11. Saving results
12. D-Bus service
13. Deskbar Applet plugins
14. CJKV support
15. Environment variables and aliases
16. How to reset indexes
17. Dependencies


1. What is Pinot


  Pinot is :
    * a D-Bus service that crawls, indexes and monitors your documents
      ("pinot-dbus-daemon")
    * a GTK-based user interface that enables to query the index built by the
      service or your favourite Web engine, and display and analyze the
      results ("pinot")
    * other command-line tools

  It was developed and tested on GNU/Linux and should work on other Unix-like
  systems.


2. Upgrading from previous versions


  * from 0.50 or older to 0.60 or newer
  The My Documents index was renamed My Web Pages. A new index, appropriately
  named My Documents ;-), includes all local files and is populated by the new
  D-Bus service.
  If you used the Import facility to index specific directories on your system,
  it is recommended you manually unindex the corresponding documents from the
  My Web Pages index, and configure these directories to be automatically
  indexed by the D-Bus service, See section "5. Indexing and monitoring".
  The My EMail index was dropped. Email messages will now appear in your
  My Documents index.


  * to 0.71 or newer
  V0.71 and newer will detect what version the My Documents index was built
  with and automatically upgrade it by reindexing all documents, if necessary.
  As for My Web Pages, the UI will indicate when upgrading is necessary.
  Updating documents with the Index, Update menu is recommended.


3. Available engines 


  One of the main functionalities of Pinot is metasearch. This lets you query
  a variety of sources, including Web-based search engines. By default, the
  list of available engines is hidden and defaults to internal indexes (see
  section "4. Indexes"). To show the list of engines, click on the Show All
  Search Engines button, next to the Query field immediately below the menu
  bar. Click on the same button again to hide the list.

  Any number of engine or engine group may be selected at any one time.
  Multi-selection is done like in any other application. All queries are always
  run against the list of currently selected engines.

  Starting with v0.42, Pinot supports both Sherlock and OpenSearch Description
  plugins. They are installed in $PREFIX/share/pinot/engines/, where PREFIX
  is usually /usr. Additional engines can be installed in that directory or
  in ~/.pinot/engines. Note this directory is not created automatically.

  Sherlock is what Firefox and the Mozilla suite use. Chances are that somebody
  wrote a plugin for the engine you are interested in. MyCroft at
  http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ has got plenty of plugins. Beware that a lot are
  out of date and will require some changes. Use pinot-search on the
  command-line to run a quick check on a plugin, eg
  $ pinot-search sherlock $PREFIX/share/pinot/engines/Bozo.src "clowns"

  Plugins are categorized by channels. For Sherlock plugins, the routeType
  element under SEARCH specifies the name of the channel the plugin belongs to.

  As for OpenSearch, A9.com has an extensive list at
  http://a9.com/-/search/moreColumns.jsp. A Description file is not available
  for all engines though...
  Pinot should work with OpenSearch Description 1.0 and 1.1 (draft 2) plugins.
  One thing to keep in mind is that because Description doesn't describe how
  to parse the results page returned by the search engine, Pinot assumes that
  the engine will return results formatted according to the OpenSearch Response
  standard.
  In practice, this means that plugins that don't stick to the following rules
  will be ignored or won't show any result :
    * For Description 1.1 plugins, the type attribute on the Url field must be
      set to "application/atom+xml" or "application/rss+xml" (default).
      "text/html" will be rejected.
    * The search engine's results page content type must be some form of XML,
      otherwise Pinot won't attempt parsing it. 
  Pinot differs from the Description spec in that it interprets the Tags field
  as a channel name. The standard defines Tags as a "space-delimited set of
  words that are used as keywords to identify and categorize this search
  content".

  If the version of Pinot you are using was built with support for the Google
  SOAP API, a "Google API" engine will appear in the group The Web (<= v0.87)
  or Current User (> v0.87). To query this engine, you will need to enter
  your Google API in the corresponding field in the General tab of the
  Preferences box. Note that Google no longer issues API keys. Building this
  engine is not recommended.


4. Indexes


  Pinot has two internal indexes. My Documents is populated by the D-Bus
  service and contains documents found on your computer. My Web Pages is
  populated by the UI whenever you :
    * import an external document, using the Index, Import URL menu
    * index results returned by Web engines, using the Results, Index menu
      or through a Stored Query
  Both index may have any of the file types listed in section "8. File formats".

  Indexes built by any other Xapian-based tools can be added to Pinot. To add
  an external index, click the + button at the bottom of the engines list.
  It can either be local, in which case you will have to select the directory
  where it is found, or served from a remote machine by xapian-tcpsrv. See
  the manual page for xapian-tcpsrv(1).

  All indexes are grouped together under the channel Current User in the
  engines list.


5. Indexing and monitoring


  Pinot can index any directory configured under the Indexing tab of the
  Preferences box. Monitoring is optional and should be disabled for the
  directories whose contents seldom change, eg $PREFIX/share/doc.
  Indexing and monitoring of directories is handled by the D-Bus service.

  In 0.90 and newer, the daemon will skip symlinks that refer to locations
  that have already been crawled, or locations it knows it will have to crawl.
  When skipped, symlinks are not followed but are still indexed, with the MIME
  type "inode/symlink".

  While Pinot is not currently able to get to and index application-specific
  data held in dot-directories, it can index common file formats as listed
  in section "8. File formats".

  All files and directories with a name that starts with a dot, eg
  ".thunderbird", are skipped and their content is not indexed. If you wish
  to include the contents of some dot-directory, create a symlink to a
  directory that is configured in Preferences. For instance, if "~/Documents"
  is configured for indexing, create a symlink from "~/.thunderbird" to
  "~/Documents/TMail". For this to work, the dot-directory must not be in a
  directory configured for indexing.

  Pinot 0.74 and older required mbox files to be configured separately. Newer
  versions are able to fully index (and monitor, if necessary) all mbox files
  found during a directory crawl, just like any other file type.

  If you want to exclude any specific files or directories from indexing, use
  patterns as described in section "9. File patterns".

  Since 0.89, Pinot supports stopwords removal. While no such list is provided
  by default, they can be easily found on the Internet. Each language has its
  own stopword list, for instance a stopwords list for English should be
  copied to $PREFIX/share/pinot/stopwords/stopwords.en

  The pinot-index program allows indexing and peeking at documents' properties
  from the command-line. Using the -i/--index option with the My Documents or
  My Web Pages index is not recommended. For more details, see the manual page
  for pinot-index(1).


6. Searching


  Searches are run differently based on the type of engine being queried.

  When querying a Web engine, Pinot assumes this engine understands the query,
  which is sent as is. No pre-processing is performed on the text of the query,
  and the results list is more or less presented as retrieved from the Web
  engine.

  When querying an index, things are somewhat different. Queries can be
  expressed in a very natural way, using a combination of operators, filters
  and ranges. This query syntax is the syntax supported natively by Xapian's
  QueryParser and is documented at http://www.xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html
  For instance, the query "type:text/html and lang:en and (tcp near ip)" will
  look for HTML files in English that mention TCP/IP. 

  Pinot supports these query filters :
      "site" for host name, eg "site:pinot.berlios.de"
      "file" for file name, eg "file:index.html"
      "ext" for file extension, eg "ext:html"
      "title" for title, eg "title:pinot"
      "url" for URL, eg "url:http://pinot.berlios.de/"
      "dir" for directory, eg "dir:/home/fabrice"
      "inurl" for documents embedded in a URL, eg "inurl:file:///home/fabrice/Documents/backup.tar.gz"
      "lang" for ISO language code, eg "lang:en"
      "type" for MIME type, eg "type:text/html"
      "class" for MIME type classification, eg "class:text"
      "label" for label, eg "label:Important"

  The directory filter is recursive, ie it applies to sub-directories.
  Allowed language codes are "da", "nl", "en", "fi", "fr", "de", "it", "nn", "pt",
  "ru", "es" and "sv".

  Stemming is available to stored queries for which a stemming language is
  defined. If such a query doesn't return any exact match, the query terms are
  stemmed and the query is run again. Stopwords are also then removed if a
  stopwords list was found for the stemming language.

  The values of "file", "url", "dir" and "label" may be double-quoted. It's also
  worth pointing out that the query "dir:/X/Y" will return files and directories
  located in /X/Y, but not Y itself, which is what "dir:/X file:Y" would do.

  In addition, these ranges are supported :
      "YYYYMMDD..YYYYMMDD" for date ranges, eg "20070801..20070831"
      "HHMMSS..HHMMSS" for time ranges, eg "090000..180000"
      "size0..size1b" for size in bytes, eg "0..10240b"

  Pinot also has support for the Xesam desktop search specifications. As of
  v0.87, provided that the xesam-glib library is found at compilation time,
  users can query a search engine that implements the Xesam interface. Note
  that the daemon doesn't itself implement that interface just yet.

  The following rules of thumb apply :
    * when querying a Web engine, queries should be entered in a format
      understood by the engine.
    * when querying the Xesam engine using the UI, queries should be entered
      in the Xesam User Language format.
    * when querying the Xesam engine using pinot-search with the -q/--xesamql
      option, queries should be entered in the Xesam Query Language format;
      otherwise, in the Xesam User Language format.
    * when querying an internal index using pinot-search, the -q/--xesamql
      and -u/--xesamul options determine the format of the query.

  See the manual page for pinot-search(1) for examples.


7. Viewing cached results


  Results returned by search engines can be viewed "live" by selecting the View
  menuitem under Results. This opens whatever application defined for the
  result's MIME type and/or protocol scheme.
  In addition, Pinot allows to view the page as cached by Google and the Wayback
  Machine. Cache providers are actually configured in globalconfig.xml, located
  in /etc/pinot/. For instance :
  <cache>
    <name>Google</name>
    <location>http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:%url0</location>
    <protocols>http, https</protocols>
  </cache>

  This is self-explanatory :-) Here it configures a cache provider called
  "Google" that handles both http and https. The location field supports
  two parameters that are substituted to obtain the URL to open : 
    * %url is the result's URL as displayed by the UI, eg
      http://pinot.berlios.de/download.html
    * %url0 is the result's URL without the protocol, eg
      pinot.berlios.de/download.html


8. File formats


  The following document types are supported internally :
    * plain text
    * HTML
    * XML
    * mbox, including attachments and embedded documents
    * MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC
    * JPEG
    * common archive formats (tar, Z, gz, bzip2, deb)
    * ISO 9660 images

  The following document types are supported through external programs :
    * PDF (pdftotext required)
    * RTF (unrtf required)
    * OpenDocument/StarOffice files (unzip required)
    * MS Word (antiword required)
    * PowerPoint (catppt required)
    * Excel (xls2csv required)
    * DVI (catdvi required)
    * DjVu (djvutext required)
    * RPM (rpm required)

  For other document types, Pinot will only index metadata such as name,
  location etc... If you wish to add support for another document type, and
  know of a command-line program that can handle that type, add it to
  external-filters.xml, located in /etc/pinot/.


9. File patterns


  Starting with version 0.62, it is possible to skip indexing of files with
  glob(3) patterns. These patterns are configured in the Indexing tab of the
  Preferences box, and can be used as a blacklist or a whitelist (as of 0.75).

  Patterns apply to files and directories. For instance, blacklisting
  "*/Desktop*" will skip "~/Desktop" and not crawl nor monitor this directory's
  contents. Similarly, a blacklist entry for "*.avi" means that Pinot will not
  attempt indexing the content of AVI files, and will ignore all monitor events
  related to these files.

  If you have never run Pinot before, the list will be pre-configured to skip
  some picture, video and archive file types such as GIF, MPG and RAR.


10. Digging deeper


  Pinot offers two ways you can dig deeper in your documents : More Like This
  suggests terms specific to documents that may help in finding related
  documents, and Search This For allows to search in results.
  Both features are enabled if one or more of the results currently selected
  is indexed, and only operate on those.

  When activated, More Like This will create a new Stored Query prefixed with
  "More Like". For instance, if you run a Stored Query with name "Me", the
  expanded query's name will be "More Like Me".

  Search For This will search those results for the Stored Query selected in
  the sub-menu and will present results in a new tab. For instance, running
  the Stored Query "Me" on a set of results will open a "Me In Results" tab.

  In addition to these, Pinot may suggest alternative spellings for queries
  that don't return any result. If it does, a new Stored Query prefixed with
  "Corrected" will be created.


11. Saving results


  Starting with version 0.72, lists of results can be saved to disk by
  selecting the Save As menuitem under Results. Two output formats are
  available to choose from in the file selector opened by Save As :
    * CSV, a text format
      The semi-colon character (';') is used to delimit fields.
    * OpenSearch response, a XML/RSS format
      See http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#OpenSearch_response_elements
      for details.


12. D-Bus service


  D-Bus activation makes sure the service is running whenever one of its
  methods is invoked by any consumer application. For instance, clicking
  OK on the Preferences box will call the service's Reload method, thus
  ensuring the service is running. This also causes the service to reload
  the configuration file.

  Starting with 0.63, the service is auto-started. The file that enables
  this is located at /etc/xdg/autostart/pinot-dbus-daemon.desktop.
  For older versions, if you want the service to be started with your X
  session, add pinot-dbus-daemon to your desktop environment's startup
  programs list.

  A few things to keep in mind :
    * in version 0.75 and older, the service didn't reload its configuration
      while running, so any change (for instance, adding or removing an
      indexable directory) only took effect when the service was restarted.
    * when starting, the service will first crawl all configured locations
      and (re)index new and modified files. Starting with 0.64, the daemon's
      scheduling priority is set very low (15, can be adjusted with --priority)
      so that you can do stuff while it is indexing !
    * when finished crawling, the service will monitor these locations
      for changes and should consume little resources, unless a huge
      quantity of files needs its attention.
    * any change detected by the monitor is immediately queued and acted upon
      as soon as possible, eg reindex a file that was modified. This and low
      priority should make the daemon not very intrusive.
    * operations that involve communicating with the daemon, such as editing
      documents metadata, may timeout if the system is under heavy load and/or
      the daemon is busy. In most cases, the message will have been received
      by the daemon, but the reply may take longer than expected. The Pinot
      UI may report that the operation failed, even though it was queued for
      processing and will be acted upon by the daemon as soon as possible.

  See section "15. Environment variables and aliases" for some tips on how to
  query the D-Bus interface. A list of available D-Bus methods can be found
  in the file pinot-dbus-daemon.xml.


13. Deskbar Applet plugins


  Deskbar Applet provides an omnipresent versatile search interface for Gnome.
  Searching documents indexed by Pinot with the applet is possible.

  Starting with Pinot 0.81, two plugins are available : a "module" for Deskbar
  2.20 or newer, and a "handler" for older versions. Both plugins rely on the
  D-Bus service to query the My Documents index.

  The module is at scripts/python/pinot-module.py, while the handler is at
  scripts/python/pinot-live.py. The module should be copied into
  $LIBS/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible and the handler in
  $LIBS/deskbar-applet/handlers for use by all users.
  For use only by the current user, the directories to copy to are
  ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible and
  ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers respectively.

  Deskbar Applet appears to sort results by names, so it may not present
  results in the same order as the Pinot UI. Additionally, searches run through
  the D-Bus interface are treated a bit differently, as terms are OR'ed
  together if no exact match is found.


14. CJKV support


  Starting with v0.83, Pinot supports indexing and searching CJKV text.
  If you would like to try this out, you will have to reset the My Documents
  index, as described in section "16. How to reset indexes".

  At search time, queries that include CJKV characters are processed in a manner
  compatible with the CJKV indexing scheme. There is no need to format the query
  in a specific format, ie no need to separate characters with spaces.
  For example, the query :
      Fabrice 你好 title:身体好吗
  will be modified internally to :
      Fabrice  (你 你好 好) title:身 title:身体 title:体 title:体好 title:好 title:好吗 title:吗

  Prior to v0.85, this processing only applied to pure CJKV queries.

  It is recommended that filters (eg "title") be used at the end of the query
  for it to be processed as expected.

  You can get a list of documents in which CJKV characters were detected
  by the indexer with the special filter "tokens:CJKV".


15. Environment variables and aliases


  Pinot tries to provide reasonable defaults for most systems, but there may be
  situations where you want to tweak these values through environment variables :
    * PINOT_SPELLING_DB
      By default, Pinot builds indexes with a spelling database. This spelling
      database may make up as much as a third of the size of the index.
      If your system is low on disk space, you can disable this with
      $ export PINOT_SPELLING_DB=NO
      Make sure this is set for your login session, ie whenever the daemon is
      auto-started. You will also have to reset indexes, as described in
      section "16. How to reset indexes".
    * PINOT_MINIMUM_DISK_SPACE
      The daemon will stop crawling and indexing files when the partition on
      which the index resides runs out of free space. By default, this means
      less than 50 Mb. To change this value to 100 Mb for instance, use 
      $ export PINOT_MINIMUM_DISK_SPACE=100
    * PINOT_MAXIMUM_INDEX_THREADS
      This sets the maximum number of concurrent indexing threads used by the
      daemon. The default value is 4.

  Another environment variable that you may want to tweak comes from Xapian.
  XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD can be set to the number of documents after which
  Xapian is to flush changes to the index. The default value is set to 10000
  at the time of writing this.
  Lowering this value should decrease the amount of memory used to cache
  changes to the index. Note that pinot-dbus-daemon explicitely flushes the
  index once it has crawled each directory configured in Preferences.

  Pinot v0.90 and newer provide a "tagged cd" script that enables to change
  a shell's current directory to the directory that matches the path elements
  passed as parameter. For instance, after setting :
  $ alias pcd='. $PREFIX/share/pinot/pinot-cd.sh'
  if ~/Documents is configured for indexing in Preferences, the following
  command would change the current directory to ~/Documents/Web/Stats :
  $ pcd Documents Stats
  If other directories match the given paths, pinot-cd.sh will display a list
  of matches. Future work will focus on disambiguation.

  If you have dbus-send installed, you may also want to set the following
  aliases :
  $ alias pinot-stats='dbus-send --session --print-reply --type=method_call \
    --dest=de.berlios.Pinot /de/berlios/Pinot de.berlios.Pinot.GetStatistics'
  $ alias pinot-stop='dbus-send --session --print-reply --type=method_call \
    --dest=de.berlios.Pinot /de/berlios/Pinot de.berlios.Pinot.Stop'
  The first will start the daemon by calling its GetStatistics method, while
  the second alias will stop it by calling the Stop method.


16. How to reset indexes


  You may wish to reset one of the index and start from scratch. There
  are several ways to do this, depending on which index it is.

  If you want to reset My Web Pages, you can either :
    * use Pinot to unindex every single document by selecting them all
      and choosing Unindex in the Index menu
    * or delete ~/.pinot/index/* while Pinot isn't running

  If you want to reset My Documents, special considerations apply because
  of the historical data maintained by the daemon. There are two ways to
  proceed, and both require that the daemon be stopped.

  The manual way is to delete the index with
  $ rm ~/.pinot/daemon/*
  and remove historical data with
  $ sqlite3 ~/.pinot/history-daemon "delete from CrawlHistory; delete from CrawlSources;"

  The automated way is to tell the daemon to reindex everything by launching
  it with the "--reindex" option, ie
  $ pinot-dbus-daemon --reindex


17. Dependencies


  The version numbers indicate the minimum version Pinot has been tested
  with; older versions may or may not work.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Libraries and tools					Version
---------------------------------------------------------------
SQLite							3.3.1
http://www.sqlite.org/

xapian-core						1.0.4
http://www.xapian.org/

 zlib							1.2.0
 http://www.gzip.org/zlib/

curl (1)						7.13.1
http://curl.haxx.se/
- OR -
neon (1)						0.24.7
http://www.webdav.org/neon/

Google SOAP API (2)	IndexSearch/Google/googleapi	beta2

 gSOAP (2)						2.7.9e
 http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/soap.html

gtkmm							2.10
http://www.gtkmm.org/

libxml++						2.12.0
http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/

libtextcat						2.2
http://software.wise-guys.nl/libtextcat/

gmime (3)						2.4.0
http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime

boost (4)						1.32.0
http://www.boost.org/

D-Bus with GLib bindings				0.61
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus

shared-mime-info					0.17
http://freedesktop.org/Software/shared-mime-info

desktop-file-utils					0.10
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/desktop-file-utils

TagLib							1.4
http://ktown.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib/

libarchive (5)						2.6.2
http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/

libexif							0.6
http://libexif.sourceforge.net/

xesam-glib (6)						0.4.0
http://xesam.org/people/kamstrup/xesam-glib/

openssh-askpass (7)					4.3
http://www.openssh.com/portable.html

---------------------------------------------------------------
External filter programs
---------------------------------------------------------------
unzip
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/UnZip.html

pdftotext
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

antiword
http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

unrtf
http://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/unrtf.html

djvutxt							
http://djvu.sourceforge.net/

catdvi
http://catdvi.sourceforge.net/

catppt
xls2csv
http://www.wagner.pp.ru/~vitus/software/catdoc/

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes :
(1) enabled with "./configure --with-http=neon|curl"
(2) obsolete - enabled with "./configure --enable-soap=yes"
(3) for gmime 2.0 support, edit configure.in
(4) for building only
(5) experimental - enabled with "./configure --enable-libarchive=yes"
(6) enabled with "./configure --enable-xesam-glib=yes
(7) experimental - required only if _SSH_TUNNEL is set
---------------------------------------------------------------------

