Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 00:21 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> 
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> > 
> > We can't possibly expect Tracker to handle every file format under
> > the sun.  Beagle doesn't, Spotlight doesn't, and I'm sure whatever
> > thing Vista is doing doesn't.  But what they provide is a way for
> > external application to provide indexers for their file formats.
> > And ISDs are doing this.  (Insert admonition about how we'd get
> > better third-party buy-in with a cross-desktop solution.)
> 
> we wont except in-process stuff as these could crash tracker - if
> they 
> can be done externally then no problem. 

I'm not so much concerned with whether or not they're
in-process.  I'm concerned with whether I can do it.

I will hypothetically posit myself as an employee of
some ISD that makes a well-known piece of commercial
software which has its own file format for documents
created inside it.  The hypothetical users of said
hypothetical software write a lot of highly technical
documents.  They consider these documents to be very
important data, and having them indexed and searched
is as important (or more important) to them as other
document formats that other people might like.

As a hypothetical employee of this ISD, I would like
to give my customers the best experience possible.
So I'd like to write the richest indexer and metadata
extractor I can for this document format, and make it
available to any user running Gnome.

I want to know if I, as a (hypothetical) ISD developer,
can do this today.  Does Tracker expose enough API and
can it map file types to custom indexers and metadata
extractors?  And if so, what are the licensing terms
of any libraries I'd have to link against.

Hypothetically,
Shaun