Re: Medusa vs Beagle (PATCH for Search in folders)

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net>]

On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 12:05 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> Il giorno gio, 02-12-2004 alle 08:41 -0500, Dave Camp ha scritto:
> > Sorry, I wasn't too clear.
> > 
> > I'm going to be putting a search interface into nautilus, and I'm going 
> > to be using beagle as my reference backend.  It'll be engineered in such 
> > a way that other engines (such as medusa) can sit underneath it.
> > 
> > Sorry for the confusion,



> Ehmm... everybody loves beagle and medusa, but what about choose[1] a
> plain and default glib/gtk search engine for the GNOME Desktop before
> add a nautilus interface? Or, even better, a freedesktop.org sponsored
> search engine?

Medusa is a plain glib search engine, and it is no where near as
compelling as Beagle.  18 months ago I abandoned all interest in doing
full-text search.  My index for 10G was 150m, and I was indexing 2/3 of
the content.  Medusa's DB is being replaced with a metadata service, one
that will be useful to Nautilus, RB, and any application that wants to
save or retrieve information.  The indexer will also be separated out,
and it may operate as a session/daemon service.  Medusa will become a
user search interface, and it will search more than just the metadata
DB.

Beagle will be as interested in the metadata DB as Medusa is.  The
indexer can be used with the metadata DB, but it can also be used by
other apps that want to extract metadata from files.  I am not
interested in undermining Beagle's momentum; revamping the msearch-gui
interface is not a high priority.  Apps like Nautilus, Rhythmbox, or
GThumb can provide the interface and result-set handling as they
require.

> I'm just saying that it seem odd to me develop a toplevel agnostic
> interface, while a common plain backend is missing. Beagle is powerful,
> but it's very high level. You need MONO, gtk-sharp, gecko-sharp, DBUS
> and a kernel patch.

I'm not sure a common back-end will work.  A high-level interface is
more desirable to me.  Search engines, from queries to result sets
differ, and to have a common interface to them will hamper each.  A
search engine's IO must reflect the users and data that interacts with.

> Honestly I think is better make GNOME depend on a small, extensible and
> 'standard' search core then implement now an interface to add search
> ability only for Nautilus. Note that "to search something somewhere" is
> a common request to a lot of applications. Rhythmbox needs it to search
> songs metadata. Gconf Editor to search key names and descriptions.
> Evolution to search contacts, task, appointments, and email contents.
> Even the user tool could need to search for user data.

I've chosen to base Medusa's new DB on Redland, a RDF standard compliant
metadata DB, parser, and querier.  The indexer will generate RDF
summaries of the data you mention above.  It will not accommodate full-
text indexing--If I want everything in the database, I think I would
prefer to be using GNOME Storage.

-- 


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sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.