Re: F-Spot Use Cases? Relevant or not?

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 00:17 +0900, Bengt Thuree wrote:
> Hej,
> 
> I asked about the F-Spot use cases last week I think, but did not receive
> any answer so I ask again.
> 
> http://primates.ximian.com/~glesage/wiki/doku.php?id=f-spot:use_cases
> 
> Do the use cases reflect the future of F-Spot (near or far) or just
> someone's wish for where F-Spot should go?
> 

They represent the thoughts of the Novell desktop design team and I take
them very seriously, but they don't imply a direct roadmap or timeline.

> For instance I found one use case stating the the person also wanted to
> search based upon the file creation time. F-Spot is only storing the EXIF
> date right now, and the database is not prepared for storing the second
> date either.

The metadata and searching issues are fairly open right now.  I'm
currently leaning more towards keeping as much metadata in the file as
possible so that other tools like beagle have easy access to it.  And
once that is done it makes sense to question if you can use those tools
to your advantage.  After all if there is a general desktop index that
has the information we want, it may make sense to use it.

So the short term plan is to get read/write of XMP working as a generic
metadata storage in both beagle and f-spot and once that is done sit
down and make some choices about what data it makes sense to have in the
f-spot index as opposed to a general desktop index.  Until that happens
I don't want to clutter the f-spot db with a lot of extra information.  

It's certainly possible it will make sense to keep everything inside
f-spot and ignore anything else but I'd like to explore other options
before committing to that path.

Or to put it another way, the use cases definitely shape the design but
they don't imply it.  They also shouldn't be taken as a feature
checklist.

> On the other hand, the use cases (or is it just anywhere on the Wiki?)
> seems to be updated very recently.
> 
> I think the Use Cases are a >>very good thing<< to have updated so we all
> know where F-Spot is going, and can perhaps come with
> suggestions/additions/changes to it? Not to mention have a link to them
> from the main F-Spot page.
> 

I agree, unfortunately the design team wiki is probably not the place to
do this sort of community design, and we don't currently have any other
place,  Suggestions are welcome.

--Larry