Michael : Don't worry I don't think people are going to sign up to typekey just to flame. I think one of the bigger problem of all this is that linux is a moving target. There are really great intelligent and highly talented linux programmer, but this is mostly wasted when another team of highly intelligent programmer decide to make a design switch which the other team depends on. Gnome is a moving target, gnome is constantly moving and evolving, every single version of gnome is different in a way, how are you supposed to target that and invest money and time to constantly support this. This fact explain mostly why KDE is moving faster as far as support goes, because Qt is tested, Qt is working, Qt is stable, all programmer can safely target it and feel safe.

Developpement is the life blood of a computing platform, microsoft know this, they move slowly carefully making sure not to change any api, the result is that a windows 95 application still work to this day, offering an enormous amount of application which attract enormous amount of users, Apple really got it with mac os X, just look at it, it was released in 2001, 3 years later we got many version of photoshop, 2 version of MS office, quark, shake, ungodly amount of audio tools etc. and this is a brand new mostly not backward compatible operating system, it has more commercial consumer app then linux ever had in all it's history. Simply amazing, and I can safely say Xcode and the well designed cocoa and carbon framework driving the X is a big part of this.

Djur : Yes indeed, gnome-storage IS a search tools with a new way to store data ( which I think is safe to say will never see the light of the day, I don't expect a postgres driven gnome anytime soon ). If you read the info from the GNOME cvs, you'll see that it's the basis for Sutra, which is the codename for the METADATA gnome system.

Well your not giving spotlight enough credit, it's good you remember BeOS, because Pavel Cisler ( BeTracker ), and Dominic Giampaolo ( BFS creator ), both work for Apple, hell they were at the WWDC 2004, spotlight is nothing more than a more elaborate BFS. Yeah it's a small world. So I think it's safe to say gnome-storage is a knockoff of tiger spotlight, which is a knockoff of BFS the most advanced filesystem available until Tiger comes along. Seriously Linux hasn't even settled the filesystem they want to use, is it ext2, ext3, reiserFS? I don't think gnome will come and settle the issue, they will build a database abstraction on top of that to store metadata, which will be incredibly slow I think. I really enjoy linux, but it really need to be critized sometimes, and this is one of those time.