[Tracker] Tracker metadata library?

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh creativecommons org>]

Hi trackerers!

I want to know if the tracker metadata reading code could be available as 
a shared library for use by other applications.  I'll take a moment to 
explain.

This summer, Jason Kivlighn and Scott Shawcroft worked with Tracker and 
Creative Commons to make extractors for license metadata for a variety of 
formats for the purpose of enabling license search in the desktop.

That's been put into a shared library called liblicense that contains 
metadata readers and writers with a few backends: flac, exempi, and 
taglib, to name a few.  Generally, our goal is to make it easy for 
developers to read and write license metadata from the files they use.

But thinking about this further, this seemed redundant with a subgoal of 
tracker, namely reading metadata from a variety of formats.  I saw 
libtrackerclient0, but that seemed only for talking to a running trackerd.

So I'd like to suggest that Tracker make a shared library available to 
other apps so that they can re-use the hard work you've done for metadata 
extraction. This is better than talking with trackerd over d-bus because 
(a) the shared-library approach means trackerd would not need be running, 
which could be advantageous in many situations, and (b) a program could 
*know* that it wants to examine the file as it is on disk, even if that 
file has not been indexed by trackerd or if the index is not up to date.

I think this leverages work you've already done without needlessly having 
others repeat that work.  What do you guys think?

-- Asheesh.

--
        A crow perched himself on a telephone wire.  He was going to make a
long-distance caw.