another app using the database?

[hydrargyrum]

I develop sit-tagger, an image file browser with its own file tagging database. I'm considering changing the database schema (which has been designed years ago) to be more like TMSU's one because it's better designed.
A further option would be to even fully support TMSU databases. However, I need some features that are not present in TMSU database, so I have a few questions:

• Is TMSU's schema "stable"?
• Is it okay if another app adds a few more tables to a TMSU database (without modifying the existing tables schema)? I don't mean incorporate those changes into TMSU, my app's schema would be a superset of TMSU's schema which would stay unchanged.
• I probably won't make TMSU a dependency of my app (which is written in python, btw), so my app would be able to create a TMSU database and manipulate it, is it fine? There aren't very many sit-tagger users, so this should not create big breakages in case of a bug :)

[0ion9]

On question 2: I have been using additional tables (and triggers on file_tag) in my schema for years now and TMSU continues to work fine. This is on a moderately large database (31k tagged files)

My alterations were also mainly done using Python. TMSU does not to my knowledge do anything particularly exotic with SQLite, so there are probably other people who have successfully done this kind of thing with different languages.

[g-gundam]

Is TMSU's schema "stable"?

@hydrargyrum - 2024 is almost over, and tmsu hasn't had a release since the end of 2019. I'd consider that stable enough. Having an image browser that supported tmsu would be useful to have too.

[hydrargyrum]

I couldn't decide myself about replacing sit-tagger's database format with tmsu's format, biggest issue being it would require 2 parallel schema version numbers (and the next one being the schema upgrade required to switch from one model to the other).

However, I started to implement an easier idea: support 2 database backends, as it doesn't require merging formats or hard-to-revert changes. There would be a --tmsu=PATH option (that would be mutually exclusive with the regular --database=PATH option). Some features would be excluded with one backend, but the core (tagging files, exploring files/tags, searching) should be fine.
I'll post updates when I have something acceptable.