Re: Nautilus search algorithm settings?

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

On Thu, 2011-10-13 at 21:59 -0400, Kyle Andrews wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm using the vanilla GNOME 3.2 Nautilus package on Arch Linux and am
> experiencing an issue with search.  Nautilus does not incorporate
> find/grep style search (as with the Search for Files GUI) in its
> results.  Only tracker results get shown.  I thought this might be
> default behavior but I tried Fedora 16 nautilus and noticed it did
> return find/grep results.  Is there some setting I have to change to
> turn on this style of search?  Gnome 3.2 has been working
> fantastically for me otherwise.  Thanks for all your hard work!

Hi Kyle,

this hasn't really changed in 3.2 from previous versions of Nautilus;
previously we used to autodetect the presence of tracker at runtime, and
use that instead of the traditional file system search if it was
available. Nautilus 3.2 has a configure option (--enable-tracker=yes/no)
that enables/disables the tracker search backend at build time.
In a tracker-enabled system, the end result is exactly the same if your
distribution enables tracker support in the Nautilus package, but I
agree this is still not ideal.

The way I think this should work is Nautilus should use both engines at
the same time; Tracker could be used as a "fast start" cache for search
results, while in the meantime a find-style search is performed in the
background, adding missing items as they're found.

Patches to implement this behavior in Nautilus are most welcome!

Cosimo