Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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.

this is doable via dbus. EG we could have a RegisterMetadataExtractor 
method that specifies the mime type of the file to be extracted and the 
path/name of the program that does the extraction.

The custom file type would need to make sure it is registered in the 
shared-mime-info database so that it can be recognised

We would then have to agree on the format of the metadata and naming so 
that it can be imported by all three.


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/