Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 19:46 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:

> myself hadn't used desktop search for years (and, it is probably just a
> lack of imagination, I cannot imagine what would desktop search be
> supposed to do in web browser)... Good and clean directory structure

Actually, I use it all the time these days - you just don't need Beagle
to do it :). The Awesomebar does it (I used to hate the Awesomebar, but
I've grown to love it). If I vaguely remember the rough title of a blog
post I read five days ago and can't find any more, I can just type
random words from it into the awesomebar until I hit the right ones and
it shows up. Basically you can just sort of remember something you read
in Firefox a while back, type in some key words, and the awesomebar will
probably find what you were looking for. I love it, it's great. Yeah, I
could maintain a meticulously pruned bookmark tree like we all did in
1996, but I'm fricking lazy. This works better :)

> seems faster to me (although out of question for most people I know)

In principle desktop search can do stuff you can't really do with a
directory structure, or at least not easily. For instance, what if you
organize your documents by date, but suddenly you'd like to just look up
all the ones which mention bananas? A good desktop search system lets
you do that. It's really hard to organize your documents into folders in
a way which lets you quickly isolate a set by _all_ criteria you might
want to. It is a legitimate idea, it just hasn't been really well
implemented yet, although Beagle does get close and it's good enough for
quite a lot of people already.

More extensive systems like Nepomuk will have even more interesting
capabilities, when they're done. Nepomuk could be really awesome if it
gets done properly. But for now, I don't think on a practical level we
can consider Beagle a "it's so important it must work" component.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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