Re: Tracker to be default search provider in next Ubuntu release

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi Kevin,

> Hey, maybe I'm woefully behind, and everyone already knows this, but
> Ubuntu has decided to install tracker by default in the next release,
> as announced in this mail:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-August/000321.
>html

Someone mentioned that in IRC, and he added "But tracker is 
only 'recommended', so I removed it immediately". So life can still go on if 
someone does not install tracker. BTW "installed by default" means ubuntu 
will install both beagle & tracker or only tracker ? The announcement email 
above is a bit confusing, it also mentions "KDE 4 beta 1" - surely that is 
not installed by default!

> found anything, If anyone knows where the discussion happened/the
> final reasoning behind the decision, it would be much appreciated.

There was a blog (probably on monologue) which mentioned that there was no 
real discussion on this topic.

But frankly I am not surprised. If you look at the bugs for beagle in the last 
2 ubuntu releases, edgy specially went out with a really bad version of 
beagle. Top of that, there were lots and lots of examples of crashing in all 
the beagle apps - beagledaemon, indexhelper, buildindex. If you look at the 
stacktraces, they all crash in some underlying library like mono or glib, 
many at similar places. But neither the stacktraces could be deciphered 
enough to figure out what is the cause nor could the crashes be reproduced by 
any developer. We tried to do our best, without any success. Last I checked, 
even 0.2.17 crash reports were there.

To add to that, tracker has this "just works" kind of feeling. Not enough 
features implemented, not many users or bla bla, whatever may be the reason, 
I have never seen people report too many problems with it. Beagle never 
misbehaves with me, but I suspect when thrown in the open, it does cause 
problems for a lot of people. At least thats what is reported. A lot of that 
is due to the really old version people are using, but in the end users are 
getting disappinted.

The tagging is a nice feature and goes hand in hand with tracker goal of 
storing and managing all data of all apps anywhere in the galaxy. I dont 
quite believe this monopolistic idea and I personally dont see beagle storing 
application data for all apps on the desktop. Let apps manage their own data 
and let beagle access it nicely, beagle is merely a "personal data search 
service" and should be good at doing just that. So that kind of tagging 
cannot be directly added all inside beagle - a third party tagging 
infrastrucure is required. (BTW, Joe added support for tagging months ago, 
and blogged about it; so this kind of tagging can be done all within beagle, 
though I would vote against it.)

And no, I still like beagle. Working on libbeagle gives me enough headache 
with "C", I am even scared to try tracker.

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user