2007/2/20, Joe Shaw <<a href="mailto:joeshaw@novell.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">joeshaw@novell.com</a>>:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi, On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 21:15 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote: > Ok. If we are to standardize something like this, I would assume that > we use dbus for rpc - as far as I can tell that doesn't seem to be a > problem..? Yeah, Beagle doesn't use D-Bus at all right now, so to implement the spec we'll have to add support for it.  (We used it 2+ years ago but it didn't work out very well at the time.) > Fx a dbus api like: > >  - AddFile (in as metadata, in s input_file) >  - AddText (in as metadata, in s text) > > where the metadata argument contains things such as uri, mime, and hit > type (in some specified order (and maybe some > filtering/stemming/whatnot info)). The AddFile method sorta replaces > the "drop-in-special-dir" approach - the drop-in-special-dir method > could still be allowed for apps not talking dbus. The AddText method > should encapsulate the functionality of Beagles' current > IndexServiceRequest/Indexable duo. Thinking ahead a bit on this one, you might want to make it so that you can add additional metadata to an existing entry in the index.  Beagle doesn't support this yet, but we're moving in that direction.</blockquote><div> I think I mentioned "getters and setters" for metadata somewhere in this thread, but that's not entirely obvious from the context of the mail you reply to :-) The methods I suggested was only for ingesting in the index. Or are you saying that there should also be a way to set metadata on the indexer and not only via the metadata api?  </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> By a data source you mean something that uses IndexServiceRequests and > Indexables? No, I mean a backend that is built as a module for Beagle.  File system, Evolution Data Server, gaim logs, etc.  These do produce Indexable objects, but they're entirely within the running Beagle instance. > In many cases the "daemon" would be the browser or a mail client - > which keeps a lot of state anyway, so I don't see that as a big > problem. In fx. an email client you can be pretty confident that other > apps doesn't mess with your data while you are not running, so there > is no need to "watch" the mailbox. I think it's the wrong approach to assume that any application will be running at a given time, and that to index its information that application has to be running.  Mail clients in particular, because there is so much information hidden underneath there that you might never see if you're only indexing email messages as the user views them. (I have over 179,000 unread emails, for example; I might -- and often do -- want to search them.)</blockquote><div> The mailbox was mainly meant as an example, but let's stick to it anyway. What I meant to say was that you can index the mailbox at any time, but the is no need to keep a watch out for changes since the only app that is ever going to change it is (say) Evolution. In a metadata aware desktop Evolution would be emitting signals (or whatever) when the mailbox changes (perhaps with hints as to what changed). Cheers, Mikkel </div> </div>