[Fwd: Re: GNOME and advanced search indexes viability]

["Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)" <amadorm usm edu ec>]

> Why not work on Medusa?  It is a gnome2 application now.  It's security
> is largely address.  Adding content indexers is simple and quick.  It is
> integrated with gnome-vfs so nfs/smb is a non issue.  It's command line
> tool can be extended in a few days to impersonate locate/find+grep to
> update the gnome search tool.
I initially thought of extending medusa, as witnessed by people on this 
mailing list.  What turned the decision against initially using medusa 
or basing code on it were several issues:
* we couldn't dual-license products based on medusa - GPL.  we do intend 
to GPL our work, but we will dual-license it as well, à là Qt.
* documentation for medusa is ZERO
* it's written in C, making development slow and making it hard to get 
people around here to work on it
* the implementation is per-user, instead of being per-system.  that 
means several medusa indexers and several indexes, instead of one master 
index.
* we don't want a hundred PCs indexing the NFS server each.  we want the 
search service to delegate queries to NFS servers, so as to avoid 
network load and wasted disk space
* as there is no documentation, we don't know if Medusa can index 
gigabytes of files, extract their data and metadata, and provide 
less-than-10 second query response.  Our initial prospect for the 
database, PostgreSQL, can indeed provide less-than-10 second response 
for queries, provided the proper indexes are applied to the proper tables.

But if you could help me work through these issues, we would be glad 
(after all, we'd be saving work) to do this. 

Trust me, what we want to do is much bigger than just medusa.  We want 
to bring enterprise-class full text indexing and search to Linux, *and* 
open-source it.  We also will be looking into data mining, to provide 
document maps and the like.  This all when the basic technology is ready.

what do you say?