[XESAM] Minutes of meeting 2007-05-15

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On 5/16/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
> MEETING:
>  * It was proposed that we had a platform independent libxesam with the core
> non-dbus related utilities such as query parsing and query construction. It
> was the general consensus that the time wasn't right. It might be good to
> have one, but we should wait and reconsider this when the spec was set was
> more mature. Toolkit specific libs abstracting away dbus and other evils
> should be provided at some point though.

Much more important at this point is a conformance test for things
that will likely be implemented differently by each project but
attempt to achieve the same thing.  The query language is one that
comes immediately to mind.  There are surely others.

>  * We reopened the services/types/categories debate, and quickly settled on
> the name categories to avoid confusing the word "type" from field types.
> Example categories are Video, Audio, Email, Contacts, etc.

In Beagle we have 3 different "types":

* MIME type: This is obvious.

* Hit type: This is a little more general than the categories you
listed.  These are things like "File", "IMLog", "Contact", "Calendar",
"MailMessage", "Note", "Bookmark", "Task", etc.  They are fairly
general, but aren't necessarily tied to a single backend or file type.

* File type: Basically categories as you've described them: Document,
Video, Archive, Mail, etc.

For a given hit, you can think of the hit and file types as two
different kinds of interfaces that are implemented.  A hit type of
"File" implies properties like file name, whereas a file type of video
implies a duration, etc.  They are largely complementary namespaces
with little overlap.  I think that having these concepts separated is
important.

Joe