Re: [Tracker] Tracker metadata library?

[Jason Kivlighn <jkivlighn gmail com>]

>     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.
I'll just quickly throw in my 2 cents.

I don't really see the work in liblicense as redundant.  liblicense
metadata readers aren't written from scratch; they simply use existing
high level interfaces to extract the license metadata.  In other words,
they already use libraries rather than duplicating existing effort.  A
benefit of this is that those same high level interfaces generally both
read and write the metadata (Tracker could be used to extract metadata,
but doesn't write it into files).

It'd be convenient that we have one dependency for reading metadata, but
in many cases the dependencies are just shifted a level (liblicense
depends on libgsf for reading msoffice files vs. liblicense depends on
Tracker which depends on libgsf for reading msoffice files).

Cheers,
Jason
>     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?
>
>
> There is a stand-alone binary for this; "tracker-extract". Strigi also
> has a command line tool (and libraries too), the strigi tool is called
> "xmlindexer".
>
> Cheers,
> Mikkel
>
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