shared wasabi implementation

[Joe Shaw]

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.

> 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.)

Joe