Re: User's preferred search tool

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

On 31/10/2007, Joe Shaw <joe joeshaw org> wrote:

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.

xesam-tools contains a set of generic unit tests against a xesam provider. Last time I checked the Beagle adaptor passed them all.

When xesam-glib is a bit more ready I plan to write patches/plugins for the file chooser, nautilus and deskbar-applet.

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.

How about launching it via dbus activation? Then the service registering the right dbus object wins. This still leaves the question of multiple contestants open though.

Xesam had a dbus UI api proposed (which has been punted/removed) with to methods ShowSearchTool() and ShowConfiguration. ShowSearchTool takes an input string as arg.

[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.

Actually no. Quite odd indeed.


Cheers,
Mikkel