http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas.html
I came across some proposals regarding GNU Findutils on the above page. All though they sound very interesting, I would like to suggest an idea of my own. I am interested in pursuing Summer of Code this year as a student, but before going headlong with my proposal, I am keen to know whether this is useful or not, and would like to have your opinion. I find that GNU Findutils, especially the updatedb and locate commands, do a very good job of indexing information regarding files on the filesystems. The good thing is that they are all command line tools, and hence the absence of any GUI-related stuff makes it possible to use them on quite low-end machines. Similar GUI tools like Beagle(http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page) or Tracker (http://live.gnome.org/Tracker/WhatIsTracker http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker) usually require the presence of a graphical environment which might not be present on many GNU installations. However the current Findutils components do not look at the meta-data of the files on the filesystems. They only look at file names. It would be really nice to make Findutils meta-data friendly. Tracker, for example, does provde a command line utility, but it is not yet a part of all standard GNOME installations, whereas Findutils is quite an integral part of any GNU based system. Moreover the presence of packages like GNU Libextracter (http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor) make it really easy to extract the meta-data from various kinds of files using on a X-less installation. One can keep writing back-ends for handling more and more file types to Libextractor to broaden its support base. To avoid adding an extra dependency on a Libextractor-like package, we can make the meta-data support optional. If Libextractor is absent we simply do not build the meta-data support. Maybe we can have provision for using any one among a pool of packages which can extract meta-data of files. So if Libextractor is absent, but Foo is installed we simply chose Foo during the ./configure stage. We can either modify the existing updatedb and locate tools, or write some separate meta-data capable components for Findutils. What do you think? Happy hacking, Debarshi -- GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7 Key server: pgp.mit.edu _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
