Re: [Usability] The virtual meta filsystem druid

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net>]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 22:49 +0200, Blad, John Erling wrote:
> Just a crazy idea..
> 
> Imagine you can somehow flag a removable disk as
> something you want to keep an image of even after
> you remove it from your system.
> Let us assume that this image can be traversed and
> that all files look pretty close to what they should
> look like, but perhaps with an added symbol to make
> it clear that it is not the real thing and without
> any large data structures.
> Now, a user clicks on some virtual file that is no
> longer part of the system and a dialog pops up with
> a statement "Insert disk xxyy" with a "Mount" button.
> So the user inserts the removable disk and clicks "mount"
> and suddenly those special symbols on the file icons goes
> away and the selected file works as expected.

This is one of the design goals of Medusa.  

The next backend will support multiple filesystems.  If the indexer is
set against a remote or removable filesystem, the metadata is added to
the local repository.  The Medusa query will return all matches, and it
may stipulate whether the results can contain removable or remote files.
It would be Nautilus's job to decide whether it needs to verify that the
non-local data is accessible.  Nautilus may choose to fade/grey the
content that it knows is not currently mounted.

> Such virtual meta files could contain enough data to
> make it possible to search for some content, perhaps
> an abstract or summary. At least it should keep indices
> from mp3 files and similar files.
> 
> This won't work with a disk that isn't static in nature,
> for example a digital camera. But hey, why would you flag
> something like this in such a system? The computer isn't
> clairvoyant (sp)! 

The indexer can be configured to ignore content either by filesystem
type or by location.  The metadata-daemon will contain short term and
long term data--the camera would be indexed if the indexer is not
configured to ignore it.

> It also won't work with a disk that is shared among several
> computers because the content will change without all the
> computers knowing about the changes. But what if they all
> have a common nfs drive?

The indexer can index anything that gnome-vfs can access, though this is
a bad strategy.  The next generation indexer will run on remote systems
and send back the metadata in a SOAP message (dbus will be used
locally).  Indexers may send metadata to multiple metadata daemons.  The
next generation Medusa will search multiple repositories.

> CD's and DVD's on the other hand, and all other read only
> devices will work great!

I think what we are waiting for is a means to id removable media.  I
think HAL may provide a signature that the indexer can include in the
metadata.

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.