Re: thoughts on meta-data (was: importing entries)

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Bill Mill wrote:
>
> Yup. If it's data, it should be in the entry - metadata should only be 
> accessible to pyblosxom, which may, in turn, give it back to the entry. 
> This is how my metatime plugin works.

I don't agree with that.  I think metadata is any data about the entry 
that's not the entry itself (i.e. the title and body).  I think it should 
be available to whatever wants to use it.


> Not true, check out the relevant lines of blosxom_file_handler. You have 
> a FileEntry object (which, admittedly, contains little other than the 
> filename and mtime):
> <snip>

Whoops!  It used to be the way I described (I'm pretty sure, anyhow) 
because that's why I wasn't able to implement the sort callback.  I should 
have checked the code involved.  My apologies.

Well, then.  I guess to fix these issues, we'd need to adjust the 
FileEntry as you mentioned so that it opens the file, pulls in the 
contents of the the file, extrapolates the title, extrapolates the 
metadata and leaves parsing the body until it's needed.

That actually (theoretically) simplifies a whole bunch of stuff:

   1) gets rid of the problem we have where metadata doesn't
      get cached in the entry cache
   2) gets rid of the problem where we have to implement metadata
      parsing in every entry parser
   3) fixes the "i want to set the mtime _IN_ my entry" problem


> What entryparsers? I ask because I really don't know what else is out 
> there. If you were going to import from a DB, you would store the 
> metadata in seperate columns of the table where you kept the story - in 
> that case metadata parsing would be *blazing*.

I can't tell what you're asking here.  There are a bunch of entryparsers 
which take a file and parse it according to different markup rules.  So 
there's a textile entry parser, a Python entry parser, a moinmoin entry 
parser, a genericwiki entry parser, so on and so forth.  The blosxom entry 
parser comes with PyBlosxom.  There are a bunch that come in the 
contributed plugin pack.  I've seen a few other ones out there in the 
wild.

In regards to importing from a DB, I think that's a whole different can of 
worms since it has nothing to do with the file-based entry system we have 
now.  It's not real high in my list of priorities, but I do have a minor 
interest in enabling other people to do what they want to do if it's 
possible.

/will


-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click