Common spec/interface for file metadata

[Jamie McCracken]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> 
> IMHO, the proper way to address this issue is to standardize the
> metadata backend instead of the interface. If everybody would use SQLite
> (for example), then it would be easy to access the metadata from every
> application without the need to do any IPC. And it wouldn't matter if
> the metadata index was generated by Beagle, Kat, or whatever other
> systems might exist today. You would have one single metadata storage,
> and every application that wants to access the metadata can simply link
> to SQLite and read from the database (it might be a good idea to provide
> a simple wrapper library with get_meta_data(), etc.). I don't care if
> it's SQLite, Berkley DB or whatever, but it's IMHO important to have ONE
> easy to use and fast metadata backend, not one backend per vendor.

I agree with you but I doubt we can persuade the established players 
(especially Beagle which uses a ready built lucene backend - they would 
find it tough to replace that). In absence of agreement from them, the 
common interface or common API is the only other way but bearing in mind 
Beagle is managed code, you cannot call any functions in it in-process 
from unmanaged code ergo we are back to IPC. Nautilus also forbids 
synchronous access to files so it needs to be async access only so again 
it would not be possible to use database in-process here too unless they 
have async api (AFAIK neither sqlite/BDB do)


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