Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

Purpose:
Zeitgeist is an event logging framework. It stores user activity in a
structured manner and provides a powerful DBus API to query and
monitor the log. Zeitgeist as such does not have a graphical
component, but is intended to integrate wherever it makes sense.

Target: desktop

Dependencies:
For zeitgeist-daemon: Python >= 2.5. PyGObject, python-dbus, python-xdg
For zeitgeist-datahub: Daemon deps + python-gtk and python-gconf
To understand the roles of these two components please see "Other
notes" below. The zeitgeist-daemon is a dependency for
gnome-activity-journal.

Resource usage:
Bug tracker: http://bugs.launchpad.net/zeitgeist
VCS: http://code.launchpad.net/zeitgeist
Releases: http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download

Adoption:
Packages (at least) for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuSE

GNOME-ness, community:
Zeitgeist was originally started as a project to power the Journal
ideas seeded at the User Experience Hackfest in Oct. 2008. It's a pure
community effort with only commercial backing being our last GSoC
project and the Zeitgeist Hackfest in Bolzano 2009. Right now we are 4
core maintainers. We've striven to be open and visible in our
development. This has also led to a steady inflow of new contributors.

Other notes:
What most people think of as Zeitgeist is split in two processes
zeitgeist-daemon and zeitgeist-datahub. The daemon does not do any
active monitoring for events, it only manages the log database and
exposes a DBus interface for inserting, deleting, querying events, and
monitoring for changes. The datahub monitors the system and pushes
events into the daemon. This architecture makes the datahub expendable
if we one day move to an architecture where apps themselves (or
something else) push events into Zeitgeist. Indeed it's already the
case that we have plugins for some apps that makes them push events
into the daemon.

Status and future:
As you may have seen we recently rolled out our 0.3.3 release. When we
complete our todos for 0.3.4
(https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+milestone/0.3.4) we are well on our
way for a 1.0 release. We regard the core engine as it is as very
stable and very near feature completion. We also have a release of the
zeitgeist-dataproviders project
(https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-dataproviders) in the pipeline, it's
a project containing a collection of different application plugins
that provides Zeitgeist integration.

--
On behalf of the Zeitgeist team,
Mikkel