Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 13:19 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> I cant comment too much on Beagle cause the last version I tried almost 
> a year ago was unusable on my 256mb machine.
>
> + whole load of stuff that tracker can do that beagle cant (while it 
> remains a dedicated indexer that is)

I thought you couldn't comment... :)

> -extensible metadata which can be mixed and match with full text
> search so you can easily search for everything with a full text
> search  of "Penguin" against a tag "zoo". We do this effortlessly with
> our powerful rdf query support.

This has always been the plan for Beagle, and we have some limited
support for it.  (We support pulling tags from F-Spot and Digikam, for
instance.)

Exactly how it should be handled from the Beagle perspective has been
unclear thus far.  To continue the tagging example, should Beagle handle
the storage of tagging itself, or should it make use of an existing
system like leaftag?  There are pros and cons both ways; to date Beagle
has largely been in the "utilize existing systems" camp, but we are
beginning to make the switch to storing that metadata ourselves.

> There are some things in common which should be abstracted though but 
> because a lot of python stuff is using tracker via dbus we would ideally 
> need beagle to implement a shared dbus interface which Im more than 
> jappy to cooperate with (mono now has some good dbus bindings so this 
> should be doable)

There has been some interest from the community about providing a dbus
search interface, and now that there are good managed dbus bindings for
Mono it's a reasonable project.  We're looking into it.

Joe