IMO implementing drag-and-drop is the simplest and meaningful operation to allow different application to pass resources. That way, there is only one interface that beagle-search has to implement. App-specific context menu would make implementing and maintaining them quite difficult - that would involve deciding which apps to support, the particular commands and switches for the operation and action of the app on that particular file. Pretty soon, the menu would become cluttered, might have the debatable hierarchical menus with deep nesting.

Exactly what we decided, this bug is meant to be a 'its impossible to support everything, so lets wish for a magic system to make it all go away' In a perfect world, there could be like an XML file where a user could pick apps (which we could provide via a centralized repo, like deskbar-applet) or something. But since thats near-impossible, its a huge wishlist. But yeah, my proposal was to ship a variety of patches which can provide support for a couple key apps (like f-spot and banshee) and let packagers ship them if they want, and let more experienced users apply them if they want, but officially support nothing.

Its a thought, I dunno.

Beagle is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes in early 2011. Its codebase has been archived (see bug 796735):
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/beagle/commits/master

"tracker" is an available alternative.

Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect
reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project
to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the
responsibility for active development again.