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

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2006/11/27, Joe Shaw <joeshaw at novell.com>:
>
> 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.



Oh - In retrospect I see that I was a bit unclear. I did not not mean that
the serach engines where *running*, I just meant that they where being
*implemented* in parallel. Sorry :-)


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.



Yeah, but I think that when to start the indexer is outside the Wasabi
scope. I think we should leave that unspecified so that we can support
non-daemon backends if the need arises (fx. grep as you say)

> 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.



There have been discussion about a org.freedesktop.search.manager interface
which clients(=apps) use to obtain the object path of the dbus service for
the search engine. Maybe my dbus-fu is to weak on this point, but I usually
need an object path to hook up to a dbus interface..?


Cheers,
Mikkel
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