Re: Medusa branch in Nautilus

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 05:19, Blad, John Erling wrote:
> What will you do about the security problems associated with Medusa?
> As I recall Medusa would gladly index any file and give any user the
> indexed files.

Medusa is no longer a system application.  It is a user application that
runs as the user.  It cannot see or do anything that you cannot do.

There are still scenario's that need to be examined.  For instance, what
happens when the permission of a file change, but the indexer doesn't
update its DB.

> I think a search capability would be nice, but as I recall Medusa is
> more or less a text only search engine?

It is at the moment.  Adding mime-type indexers is in the near future. 
>From the Medusa dot plan:

5.4 Content indexers
        Update the medusa plain/text indexer to accept UTF-8 and I18N
        the lexicon rules. Revise the plugin architecture to register
        plugins in GConf (like thumbnailers); each plugin must guarantee
        to generate UTF-8 text, and provide either a standard out or
        data-model access. Creating plugin chains will be explored. Look
        at extending libgsf to provide all meta/summary data for common
        file types such as office docs, PDFs, images, audios.
        
        We need content indexers for the most common documents on GNOME
        desktops: GnomeOffice, OpenOffice, MS Office, PDF/PS, jpg/png,
        mp3/ogg, and X(HT)ML file types. Smart indexers could recoginze
        browser caches and represent the content in searches as residing
        on the remote server instead of the file cache. A good indexer
        could know to follow links in documents, or bookmark files. An
        mbox VFS module would be very useful for accuratelly indexing
        Evolution's mail, and provide a means of linking to emails in
        mboxes to display them in Evolution
        
It's uses extend beyond file searching.  It provides automated file
management as a desktop link.  Instead of navigating to view a subset of
files to open, it can just show all the files an application can open,
and the user can select to view a subset.  It can replace the Rhythmbox
and Evolution content indexes too.  It might best be viewed as a
content/file database that any application can use as long as a content
plugin is available.

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.