[Earth-developers] Project goals document

[Matthew Landauer]

Hi all,

 From reading the excellent book "Producing Open Source Software -  
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" available at http:// 
producingoss.com/ I've learned some very valuable things.

Anyone that hasn't had a chance to read this book I heartily  
recommend it. It's clear, well written with some great stories and  
excellent advice.

One of the pieces of advice - "Have a clear mission statement" (see  
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/getting-started.html#mission- 
statement)

So, if nobody minds I'm going to go ahead and put some ideas on paper  
(well on the trac wiki actually). Please, as always, please please  
edit it / add to it / delete stuff as is the way with wikis.

Here are some initial thoughts on some features for the future (most  
of these are already in trac in some form)

* Extract metadata from files through plugins (For example: file  
naming convention - extract job/sequence/shot name, image type/width/ 
height for images,
* Allow searching/sorting in the web application on the metadata
* Uniquely identify files through embedding unique keys and/or md5  
sums - understand duplicate files in different locations
* Integrate Earth with Beagle, Spotlight, Google desktop search
* Make Earth permissions aware so that users can only examine stuff  
on Earth that they have normal permissions to do (equivalent of the  
difference between slocate and locate)
* Write drop-in replacement for "locate" command that uses Earth


Hmmm, the mission statement: how about something along these lines

"To create, as a community, a scalable, fast, cross-platform system  
for indexing and tracking files across large number of computers to  
manage disk space and organise semi-structured collection of billions  
of files."

"To create, as a community, a system for organising and understanding  
semi-structured collections of billions of files, with petabytes of  
data, across hundreds of machines"

"To create, as a community, a system for organising and understanding  
semi-structured collections of billions of files, with petabytes of  
data, across hundreds of machines with an initial focus on managing  
the explosion of data that occurs in digital visual effects work"

"To create, as a community, a system for finding and indexing files  
and managing disk space across hundreds of machines with billions of  
files and petabytes of data"

What do you think?

Matthew

Dr. Matthew Landauer
Visual Appliance Limited
www.visualappliance.com
+61 2 9361 0848



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