simple search api (was Re: mimetype standardisation by testsets)

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 16:26 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> The situation at hand is that we have a  handful of desktop search
> engines, all implemented as daemons, both handling searches and
> indexing. 

Yeah, but this situation isn't realistic.  The user should never be
running more than one search system at a time.  When they type in
"vacation photos" they don't care which engine is being used underneath,
they care about getting their vacation photos.

To ensure timely indexing of the user's data in the background, these
search engines really have to be started as part of the user's session
and not on-demand.  (Although a non-indexing searcher like "grep" would
be fine on-demand.)  I want all of my vacation photos to be indexed by
the time I have to search for them.

> Having an extra daemon on top of that handling the query one extra
> time before passing it to the search subsystem seems overkill...
> Ideally I see the daemon/lib (or even executable) to only be used as a
> means of obtaining a dbus object path given a dbus interface name ("
> org.freedesktop.search.simple").

I feel like I missed something in this thread thus far, but why is a
library or separate daemon necessary?  Why would the engine not simply
grab the "org.freedesktop.search.engine" (or whatever) name at startup
if it's available?  If nothing has the name, you could activate a
grep-based fallback or something like that on-demand.

Joe
>