Xesam meta-meta-data spec needs attention.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2007/5/2, Evgeny Egorochkin <phreedom.stdin at gmail.com>:
>
> On Wednesday 02 May 2007 15:46:15 jamie wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 14:13 +0200, Sebastian Trüg wrote:
> > > Hmm, so now you ignore RDF?
> > > Don't get me wrong, it is your project, so in the end it is your
> > > decision. I am just a little confused why we have this wiki page then.
> :)
> >
> > Im too busy (until mid-may) to comment on the spec in much detail
> >
> > perhaps we can arrange an online discussion mid may to flesh this all
> > out
> >
> > I have a few concerns with the nature of the proposed desktop file spec.
> >
> > I agree its important the desktop file should be easily convertible to
> > rdf but we do want to eliminate the complexity (and extra overhead of
> > rdf) as much as possible from it - that is the point of having the
> > desktop file.
>
> I think still this compexity issue is not an issue at all. The reason I
> think
> so is:
> 1) most of metametadata definitions will be provided by Xesam
> 2) code to parse this in the database will be written only once
> 3) If a dev needs an exotic field, somebody can help. It's not much of
> work.


Don't underestimate where newcomer devs poke around. I clearly remember
myself a good while back poking around with some fancy gnome-vfs code, some
objects read as .desktop files, and even if I didn't know anything about
those at that time I could readily work with them. Who knows - if that had
been some obscure format (sorry I don't mean that rdf is obscure :-)) I
might have stopped there and might not have been here today...

So even if most apps will use a helper lib don't forget that we should also
make it easy for people to poke around. Didn't we all start that way?


So what is more important is flexibility, extensibility and compatibility.


Don't the .desktop-approach have that?

Also, it is important to act fast, otherwise the goal of compatibility is
> unattainable since much of the code gets written around metadata spec.
> Analyzers are written to extract data and feed in to the indexer in a
> specific
> format. It becomes a real problem if our projects do this in a different
> way.


100% right. This is a problem that is hard to address. The only solution is
just to not despair and just keep the train rolling, panic solutions are
deemed to end up disastrous at some point.

Cheers,
Mikkel
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