personal document mgmt system idea

[John J. Lee]

sandskyfly at hotmail.com (Sandy Norton) writes:

> I have been mulling over an idea for a very simple python-based
> personal document management system. The source of this possible
> solution is the following typical problem:
> 
> I accumulate a lot of files (documents, archives, pdfs, images, etc.)
> on a daily basis and storing them in a hierarchical file system is
> simple but unsatisfactory:
> 
>        - deeply nested hierarchies are a pain to navigate 
>          and to reorganize
>        - different file systems have inconsistent and weak schemes 
>          for storing metadata e.g. compare variety of incompatible 
>          schemes in windows alone (office docs vs. pdfs etc.) .
> 
> I would like a personal document management system that:
[...]
> The system should promote the following simple pattern:
[...]

Pybliographer 2 is aiming at these features (but a lot more besides).
Work has been slow for a long while, but several new releases of
pyblio 1 have come out recently, and work is taking place on pyblio 2.
There are design documents on the web at pybliographer.org.  Why not
muck in and implement what you want with Pyblio?

[...]
> My initial prototyping efforts involved creating a single test table
> in
> mysql (later to include fields for dublin-core metadata elements) 
> and a BLOB field for the data itself. My present dev platform is
> windows XP pro, mysql 4.1.1-alpha,  MySQL-python connector v.0.9.2
> and python 2.3.3 . However, I will be testing the same app on Mac OS X
> and Linux Mandrake 9.2 as well.

ATM Pyblio only runs on GNOME, but that's going to change.


> The first problem I've run into is that mysql or the MySQL
> connector crashes when the size of one BLOB reaches a certain point:
> in this case an .avi file of 7.2 mb . 
> 
> Here's the code:
[...]
> _mysql_exceptions.OperationalError: (2006, 'MySQL server has gone
> away')
> >Exit code: 1
> 
> </traceback>
> 
> My Questions are:
> 
> - Is my test code at fault?
> 
> - Is this the wrong approach to begin with: i.e. is it a bad idea to
>   store the data itself in the database?

Haven't read your code, but the error certainly strongly suggests a
MySQL configuration problem.


John