Making beagle optional

[Cam]

Jens

> I'm personally really disappointed that Beagle's no longer in the
> default install.  This isn't to rag on Alex, or to even disagree with
> him - if it's causing bugs like this, then I understand why this had to
> be done, at least for now.  But Beagle's a great tool - I use it
> *daily*, and while it's no problem for me to simply add it back into my
> package set, it's too bad that new users won't have Beagle's great
> features out of the box.

I can appreciate the idea behind a system wide search, but I feel that 
it is not viable in a distribution until the usability of that search 
exceeds or matches the usability of search features built into 
individual apps.

For example at the moment I can use Firefox to search remote IMAP 
mailboxes very effectively. Similarly I can use rhythmbox to search for 
some music, and I can use <photo app of choice> to find pictures. I 
wouldn't dream of using a search tool to try and find any of these 
because the apps I would then use to edit/view/use the files already do 
a really good job. So the use case for the search tool evaporates, and 
it becomes an annoyance, even if it only uses 30% CPU.

Do any of the search engines try to publish an API that applications can 
use to implement their indexing / searches? I think that could be a step 
towards a unified search tool.

-Cam

-- 
camilo at mesias.co.uk                                                 <--