[Xesam] Metadata Storage Daemon

Jamie McCracken jamie.mccrack at googlemail.com
Tue Jan 15 07:46:55 PST 2008


On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 16:36 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> On 15/01/2008, Sebastian Trüg <strueg at mandriva.com> wrote:
> > On Friday 11 January 2008 23:54:07 Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> > > I have one question that I have not really thought through myself yet...
> > >
> > > Should the storage monitor files? Fx Should the store drop data on
> > > files that are deleted? This makes good sense if we talk about
> > > tagging, since I don't want to list files that had tag "foo" back when
> > > they existed (apps could do a stat-dance to check existence, but i
> > > would rather avoid that).
> > >
> > > Or more generally updating internal structures if parts of graphs are
> > > modified in a way that must be propagated for the layout to remain
> > > consistent (fx clean up dead links[1]).
> >
> > Actually in nepomuk I do this independently and I think this is solution to go
> > for "these days". The storage service only provides the actual data while
> > another file monitoring service handles updating it.
> > This allows for an easy combination of different implementations and simple
> > replacement with more advanced components. It also allows different services
> > for different storage locations such as NFS or USB sticks or whatever. I
> > think nowadays questions like these should very often be answered with "make
> > it modular".
> >
> 
> Yes, I tend to agree on this. The indexer is already watching files
> and maybe other sources. If other programs store data in the storage
> it is probably easier for them to just update it manually instead of
> having to provide a monitor-plugin (which again we would have to
> standardize in a cross-platform way in Xesam, eeeks).
> 

if you want it to "just work" then it needs to be integrated with
indexer otherwise it would require integration with all clients
including vfs, email apps and anything else which might prove difficult
and or overlap with each other.

the other advantage of indexer integration is that the indexer already
handles cases where data is modified or deleted even when its not
running. 

my feeling is that duplication of effort and storage required with
independent metadata daemon and indexer is too much and not practical
(unless you want a dumb metadata daemon)

jamie





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