Re: search branch merged

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Today I merged the nautilus-search2 branch to HEAD. The code is not
> totally done yet but it should mostly work, and I wanted to get
> it into the 2.13.3 so some people would look at it. Also, the branch
> contained various memleak and other fixes that I wanted to get in.
>
> The search engine is pluggalble, to the extent that it is internally
> factored out. However you can't install search engines outside of
> nautilus atm. I.E you have to actually rebuild nautilus with libbeagle
> installed to get support for beagle. This is beacuse I'm not ready to
> export the APIs required to implement search backends outside the tree
> yet (the code/API is not mature enough for that). If you don't have
> beagle (or some other indexer) availible at build and running at
> runtime then Nautilus will fall back to a simpler non-indexed search
> engine which will work, but be slower and won't search on file
> contents.


Can I make a few suggestion to this:

I'm not sure how to theme the colour but would it make more sense to use 
the menu bar colour? Themes like Clearlooks always make the menubar 
stand out and its recommended for themes to do this.

Having to put a search term in before filtering further can cause 
problems and limitations. If you use the simple non-indexed search it 
kills system performance because its doing a global search before you 
have a chance to filter. The other problem is there is no easy way to 
create a vfolder that just shows all documents (the search term you are 
forced to enter will always filter out some documents!). Maybe show the 
filtering options when the user clicks the search button? (can be a 
gconf setting?) and thus make the search term optional?

Supporting more filter types. As you know Tracker supports a vast array 
of metadata (as per the freedesktop spec) which neither Beagle nor the 
simple non-indexed search supports atm so I think we need some query 
capability call in the backends. Tracker also supports operations 
(equals, contains, <>, >, <, between) which are more relevant depending 
on the metadata type being searched (ie a date would use between, =, <, 
> as would an integer based one like filesize). AFAIK Beagle also 
supports date ranges. Are you happy to support this if I create a patch?


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/