indexing removable sources

Debajyoti Bera <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.gnome.dashboard.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,
	I checked in one attempt at indexing removable media (CDs, USB keys, external 
hard drives, network mounts or even regular directories which can loaded, 
unloaded at runtime etc.).

* Get svn trunk, build, install etc.
* Start beagled (pass "--backend none" to run with only removable indexes)
* Create a static index and pass "--removable" to make it removable
  $  beagle-build-index
        --removable
        <and other usual options>
        --target /path/to/index
        /path/to/mount/directory

    * you can pass "--source <source>" to use an easily recognizable name for 
the media, it is set to the directory name of /path/to/index by default
    * you can store the index inside the mounted directory or outside, as you 
wish
    * apart from the source, the Hal volume-label is stored as 
beagle:RemovableLabel and can be searched against.

* Ask beagled to mount the removable index at runtime
  $ beagle-removable-index
        --indexdir /path/to/index
        --mount /path/to/mount/directory

* Check beagle-index-info to verify
* Perform queries

* Ask beagled to unmount the removable index, again live
  $ beagle-removable-index
        --indexdir /path/to/index
        --unmount /path/to/mount/directory

There might be some rough patches so I would really appreciate some testing. 
And some feedback on the command line options, the beagle-removable-index 
tool and any other information to set or store in the removable index.

Thanks,
- dBera

PS: Why use two separate paths for the index directory and the mounted 
directory ? Because in the past discussions, we could not decide where to 
store the index for removable sources. This way users can decide themselves 
what works best for them.

PPS: It is trivial to allow searching unmounted media. In that case, if a 
result is found in the unmounted medium, then it will be flagged and the UI 
can display a prompt asking the user to insert the specific medium. Sort of 
like searching catalogues. Would this be any useful ?

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------
Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE / Mandriva / Inspiron-1100
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