Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 21:21 +0200, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> So it this is not a sales talk, what is it? It's a call for
> standardization. This discussion between competing programs is a great
> time to start talking about common functionality. With regards to
> desktop search there are many things that can be standardized:
> - query language
> - metadata names and meaning
> - test suites
> - DBus APIs
> - index formats

I would also add "extension interface for ISDs".  If a developer
creates an application that uses its own file formats (or makes
use of some other applications' formats), then she should be able
to provide an indexer and metadata extractor for those formats.

Analogously, ISDs can install thumbnailers for their file formats,
and both KDE and Gnome can create thumbnails of those files using
the same thumbnailers.  This is awesome.

I realize that a shared indexer extension system is likely more
difficult than a shared thumbnailer extension system.  But if
short of having only One True Indexer, it's the only way we'll
get wide-spread ISD buy-in.

--
Shaun