Re: [Nautilus-list] future plans for the search feature

[Rebecca Schulman <rebecka eazel com>]

I am going to remove the options to enable and disable fast search in
nautilus, and disable the ability to request a reindex
from nautilus for the time being tomorrow, unless someone objects and/or
proposes an alternate short term solution.

Also, I should be clear that removing medusa disables both the fast and
slow search feature, not simply the indexed search feature.  Another plan
for the short and/or long term would be to include the ability to do slow
searches in nautilus, but
not include indexing to make searching faster.


Rebecca


Rebecca Schulman wrote:

> We recently decided that potential/known  security issues involving
> medusa were sufficient to warrant removing the fast search feature from
> both nautilus for 1.0.1.  We will also be releasing 1.0.2
> without the fast search feature.
>
> If we would like to return to having a fast search feature in Nautilus,
> we need to decide on two courses of action regarding how the feature
> will work.  The first part of the plan is to remove the ability for
> normal users to configure medusa's setup, and to change the Nautilus UI
> to work accordingly.  The second step in the process is to decide on a
> specification for the search feature that minimizes security risks, and
> still remains close to our original vision for the feature so that we
> can ship a Nautilus with medusa again in the next release (1.0.3) if at
> all possible.
>
> I have come up with a bunch of suggestions intended to address each part
> of this plan.
> Listed with each suggestion are the advantages and disadvantages of the
> suggestion that I can see.
> These lists are not intended as any set of decisions so further
> discussion can certainly include things not here.
>
> Here are some suggestions on how to deal with enabling and disabling
> medusa when it requires a root password:
>
> (1)   Leave the "fast search" preference in its current place, but
> require a root password to turn the indexing feature on or off.
>
> This choice seems to require relatively few code changes, but there are
> a bunch of drawbacks.
> One is the issue of having a different "fast search" preference at
> different user levels.  If this happened,
> a user might be asked for their root password when changing user levels,
> which would be strange indeed.  It's also not clear that a system
> setting like whether your computer is indexed or not is actually a
> "nautilus preference".
>
> (2)  Remove the ability to turn medusa on and off in nautilus for now.
>
> We could include documentation about how to turn the search feature on
> as root in either the user manual, or as a dialog that came up when the
> search feature was activated. This is easy to implement, but probably
> makes the search feature, which is already hard to use, worse.
>
> (3)  Make turning medusa on and off a "system preference" which is done
> separately than other nautilus user preferences.
>
> We could extend the "indexing information dialog" so that  you could
> enable and disable medusa from here. Making this work logically would
> also involve making the dialog available at all times, since it is
> currently only available when viewing search results (This is
> bugzilla.eazel.com bug 3254 http://bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3254)  This
> option would probably involve the highest level of code change of the
> options listed here.
>
> I am not overly excited about any of these possibilities.  My personal
> preference is to do (2) until we figure out what to do in the long term,
> even though the UI is suboptimal, since it's likely work we do for this
> may never be shipped.