Announcing Wasabi - Unifying Desktop Search - feedback needed

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

This email have been sendt to: desktop-devel-list at gnome.org,
xfce4-dev at xfce.org <xfce4-dev at foo-project.org>, kde-devel at kde.org ,
xdg at lists.freedesktop.org

* In Short:
Wasabi is new project with the goal of creating a unified, platform
independent, specification and api for desktop search engines (and later
metadata services). We have worked together with several search-projects and
now have a proposal ready for public evaluation. In short: we need feedback
from application developers - that means you.

* Providing Feedback:
I suggest you start by reading the proposal at
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/WasabiAbout
:-) Post any feedback in this thread. I shall try to the best of my effort
to answer any questions, but have patience with me if I'm flooded (there are
four big mailing lists involved here). In the case I can't find time to
answer everyone I promise that your voice will still be heard and taken into
serious consideration before we finalize anything. The public evaluation
period ends at 2007-03-06 (one month from now).

* About Wasabi
Wasabi is currently going on at the xdg mailing list at freedesktop.org. As
already stated it is an effort to create a unified framework for desktop
search- and metadata services. Our first target will be  search part of
things, but it has ties into the metadata part that we will attend to as
soon as the search spec is stabilizing (fx. like standardizing metadata
filed names).

The apis will be dbus apis that is both suitable for "direct use" and
bindings for your favorite toolkit. Where appropriate we will adopt known
standards, but also keep in mind that we are defining a *desktop*
specification and not a spec for generic database servers in networked
environments (there are several of these already).

The search spec was created with input from various projects including
Tracker, Strigi, Beagle, Pinot and Recoll. I would specifically like to
thank Magnus Bergman for his very insightful comments.

* FOSDEM 2007
I will be doing a talk on Wasabi in Brussels at FOSDEM2007. At that time
we'll still be in the evaluation period for the search spec.


Cheers,
Mikkel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20070206/c3bbda69/attachment.html>