Re: Mono bindings a blessed dependency? [Was: Tomboy in 2.16]

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 17:15 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> > In which sense it's a "fd.o project"?  Considering that:
> > 
> >   * the spec upon which is based is in on the wiki, in the "even less
> >     than a draft" section, and it can be edited by anyone with an
> >     account[1];
> >   * I didn't see any endorsement by anyone - except by the projects
> >     for which Jamie did wrote a patch for;
> >   * I don't see anyone except Jamie working on it, making Tracker
> >     _and_ the spec as the next candidates to the "son of egg-recent"
> >     competition[2];
> 
> Deskbar developer Mikkel Kamstrup (http://kamstrup.livejournal.com/) 
> wrote the deskbar handler and has committed himself to write a PYGTK GUI 
> for tracker.

Glad to hear that.


> > [1] Dublin Core anyone? Timestamps not using ISO8601 but something that
> > is similar-yet-not-quite-enough?
> 
> should be ISO8601.

No, it's not. It's something similar, but doesn't validate as such; and
ISO8601 has more than one format for dates.

An implementation of a ISO8601 parser is included in libsoup and inside
GLib 2.11; you should really look at that.  Also, the usage of timestamp
is inconsistent at best: the File.* namespace uses timezones, while the
Audio.* and Image.* do not.

>  We need namespaces/classes for metadata as raw DC is 
> not appropriate and hierarchical rdf types are very inelegant (and 
> unmanageable in tracker's DB).

You are making a common mistake - I did that too, so a word of advice:
you don't write the spec to adapt it to the implementation; it's really
the other way around. Otherwise, you'll have the perfect implementation,
but other will have to pass through hell.  Remember that fixing a bad
implementation is simple - fixing a bad spec is really not.

You must design the spec *without* the implementation in mind.  It's
harder: yes.  It creates a *useful* spec: yes.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net