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

["Kevin Kubasik" <kevin kubasik net>]

On 8/23/07, Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> 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!
>
Hmmm, I wouldn't think so ;) From a quick glance at launchpad, I think
that the installer will just include tracker in the default install,
but it is not a core dependency, so users can remove it without issue.

> > 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.
Yeah, its been a mess.
>
> 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.

Sad but true.
>
> 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.)
I have to agree that one massive uber-store is a doomed effort,
however, the idea of adding extra user-defined information is feature
with significant demand. Now I don't mean make beagle an end-all
metadata store, but allowing the tags/notes values to be edited from
beagle-search (even if we just open the nautilus details/properties
view for a file) could have a lot of potential.

In the end, I would really almost rather that beagle just query a
dumbed down tracker (no crawler, just a metadata store, it does that
well). Leaftag was situated to offer that functionality, but it has
been eclipsed by tracker. In leu of some other project storing that
information, why not us? I know its not the original scope/design, and
I'm not all for Beagle being a sole metadata store, but I don't have
better idea at the moment other than tracker. I think that expanding
our external metadata store to provide more of those tagging/metadata
style features is imperative in the evolving desktop. Even if we
almost never use it internally, giving 3rd party apps the option of
using beagle's lightning fast data retrieval, and storing some of
their own.

I dunno, I've never used tags in a desktop environment before,
primarily because theres no easy interface to them.

Barring the 'beagle' side of things, do people/developers see this as
a needed/wanted feature? I mean, the excitement surrounding tracker
has been giving me the impression that everyone sees this as a 'must
have' for new-age desktops. Is that perception wrong?

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

Agreed, not to debate the merits of languages/environments, but just
b/c code is scary.
>
> - dBera
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
> beagle / KDE fan
> Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user
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-- 
Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik
http://kubasik.net/blog