Ankur Sethi wrote: > Although I didn't follow most of the discussion about the finer points > of OpenBeFS, I gather that most people recommend attaching certain > attributes to each file (and everyone seems to have different opinions > on how that should be done). Wouldn't this involve going through each > file on disk and reading its attributes every time someone runs a > query? Wouldn't that slow down the process? No, because BFS can index the attributes. Using a database for the same values as are also stored in attributes will result in confusion because the two can and will get out of sync. Another benefit of extracting the data to attributes is that you at the same time solve the problem of manually populating attributes for things like media files. François corrected me before when he said that the search interface does not need to know what attributes should be searched because the mime db already knows this. Add a rule about only searching fields that are indexed and you are good to go. I think the storage part is more or less solved. The missing parts are an index feeder with examples of file type plugins (e.g. mp3 and plain text) and a library and UI for performing a spotlight-like search. -Truls