Re: User's preferred search tool

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On 10/31/07, jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:27 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > who knows how's xesam these days? is it still written in python? do
> > search engines implement the xesam query spec?
> >
>
> I think beagle has preliminary support for it but not sure how much it
> covers

Beagle has an "adaptor" which translates Xesam requests into Beagle
and marshals them back out.  We've only implemented the server-side of
things.  AFAIK there's no conformance test for the spec, but Beagle
covers most of it.  There are a few things in the spec that Beagle
doesn't support, but they're pretty minor.

Also, AFAIK there are no search clients which implement the
client-side of the spec other than the reference tools, and that's
something that really needs to happen before Xesam can be considered a
functional spec.

The uptake has been pretty slow.  I like the idea of adding gconf keys
for launching the tools so that distros can customize to their
preferred search system[1], but exposing it in the UI does feel a bit
like bloat.

Joe

[1] At least SUSE-based distros are already patching Beagle in for
gnome-search-tool; I suspect Ubuntu is probably doing something
similar for Tracker.