Re: [patch] Add a timestamp to metafiles

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 12:17 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Joe: We should really make a plan on how beagle and nautilus should
> integrate for 2.14, specifically wrt indexing/metadata. Are there any
> docs online explaining what beagle does when indexing and where it keeps
> around its metadata? 

No docs, but I can explain it a bit.  Beagle uses Lucene
(http://lucene.apache.org/) to do its indexing.  The metadata from
nautilus will just be extracted from the XML and placed in a field in
the index.  That data is all stored in Lucene indexes in .beagle, but
the right way to search that data is through client APIs.

Beagle uses extended attributes for setting fields on files for
meta-metadata, like the last time it was indexed, what filter did the
indexing, etc.  This data isn't searched; it's mostly for bookkeeping
and efficiency reasons.

If Nautilus started using EAs for this metadata, that'd be great.  It'd
be faster and easier for us to read and index.  Beagle isn't a general
metadata framework today; EAs seem to be much more appropriate for that
to me.  But Beagle is there to index and search that data.

There is some metadata that Beagle indexes that's extracted from the
content of the files themselves.  Getting that metadata is possible
today with a C client library, and the start of the beagle-nautilus
integration is being done on the nautilus-search branch of nautilus.

Joe