Re: Inital Deb Filter

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 14:29 -0400, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> Ok, I started fixing FilterDeb to use FilterPackage, but a few questions.
> 
> 1) Do we not want to index any dependency information at all? ATM I
> was planning on leaving in the code in the deb filter that extracted
> and stored all the dependencies, which might be a nice UI
> feature/something that someone who writes a 'Package Backend' would
> need.

Probably not.  As someone who prior to working on Beagle made his living
writing package management tools, my feeling is that stuff like this is
best suited for those tools.  Generally speaking, a tool using RPM's
APIs can list and search dependencies a lot faster than Beagle ever
could, because librpm is designed and optimized for it, and Beagle is
optimized for text searches.

> 2) Are we making the description a property or the text. In the debian
> world, the Description of a package is 2-6 paragraphs detailing the
> packages function. Which seems much more like something we should
> treat as text (ie AppendText()) as opposed to a huge property.
> Especially since debian package descriptions can be very long, we
> would want to have the option of snippeting the descriptions, not
> displaying the whole thing in the UI. (Hence why I have SnippetMode =
> true).

It's possible, but the contents of the text aren't stored in the index,
so it won't be possible to ever display the entire description.  (Unless
you manually pulled it out of the TextCache.)  I personally don't have a
strong opinion on it either way; my inclination is to make it be the
text.

Joe