Re: Re(2): Database storage approach

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

This sounds like a better idea.  Basically what you are sugesting is to
keep an index of the users documents (similar to the locate command) to
make searching for them quicker. But instead of just searching by
filename, you may want to search by mime type or keywords or some other
piece of metadata for the file.

Since we already have metadata support in GNOME, it may be possible to
modify GNU locate so that it can index on certain metadata keys as well.
It may also be worth changing the metadata functions in libgnome so that
they update the index as well (so you don't have to run an updatedb type
application every night).

Now with a GUI frontend to this modified locate command, we would have
quite a powerful search tool (it may be integrated with gmc or the search
dialog, which would be even better).

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Alexander Peuchert wrote:

> Hi everybody,
> 
> oops, it seam that I started a very radikal discussion here.
> 
> After reading through the mails I see it this way:
> 
> storing everything in a database would be very complicated. There would
> also be a risk of loosing everything, if the database isn't backed up.
> Also non-gnomish apps couldn't access the files.
> 
> Next thing power user still want to have access to the files for
> SEDing/AWKing/... them.
> 
> But for me it's very important to make GNOME usable for people not
> familiar with computers.( This would bring GNOME way ahead of M$ W?????S!)
> I hope I don't need to explain here how often I have to provide some
> knowledge on copying floppies or finding files. And that's because the
> storage approach of W?????S isn't easy to understand for
> computer-outsiders!!!
> 
> 
> So, here is another try:
> 
> still store things the normal way, but put a database atop of it. Also
> allow to use the fileselector in two different ways. First normal
> filesystem view, second virtual database view!
> The database indexes all stored files and keeps track of changes from not
> gnomish apps.
> 
> How about that ?
> 
> 
> Alexander Peuchert
> mailto:alexander@peuchert.de
> http://www.peuchert.de ( not very interesting yet ;-) )
> 
> 
> 
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