Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 03:10 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We have just released a new stable version of tracker (0.5.0) which can 
> > be found here:
> >
> > http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-0.5.0.tar.bz2
> >
> > I would like to propose this for inclusion into Gnome 2.18 as its now 
> > been well tested and should be stable enough.
> >
> > Tracker is being developed by a growing community of volunteers to 
> > create the best and most efficient desktop search, extensible metadata 
> > server and next generation first class object database all in 100% C code.
>
> "next generation first class object database" sounds a bit like buzzword
> bingo to me. Can you be a bit clearer? I don't meant to be discouraging
> - I just want you to tell us about the good stuff.

tracker is not just an indexer but a complete database for first class 
objects. It can behave for example as a common music database for apps 
like rhythmbox where a dbus api can provide easy to use methods for 
retrieving and querying all music files indexed (you cant ask a 
dedicated indexer for example to get a list of all unique artists but 
you can with tracker).

It also has fully extensible metadata and a desktop wide tag/keyword 
database so apps can use it to store all their metadata about any first 
class object (also kind of nice for integrating with the new G-VFS 
metadata handling)

Its similiar to BEos tracker in this regard although more powerful (but 
not extreme crack like WinFS!)

It also bears some similiarity to the old gnome storage project 
(although files themselves are not stored in the DB or anything like 
that but other entities can be)

It can provide persistent storage for other objects like notes, emails 
(kill off mbox files!) people (replace EDS?) , appointments etc where 
each object is fully extensible as above with metadata, keywords and 
inter-relationships.

So to sum up it provides infrastructure for the following:

1) Storage of first class objects
2) Indexing of first class objects
3) Extensible objects with unlimited app/user definable metadata and 
keywords
4) Nice dbus api for applicable methods for all first class objects


I intend to make first use of this first class object facility by 
creating a new bookmarks/history database for epiphany as well as said 
music database for Rhytmbox et al.

If it cant be accepted as a new module for whatever reason then I would 
like to add it as a dependency to Gnome so I can incorporate the 
epiphany bookmark/history database during 2.18


> > Tracker now comes with a new GUI tool - Tracker search tool which is 
> > based on the source of Gnome search tool and if accepted it should 
> > replace this.
>
> Is there Nautilus integration? It wouldn't make much sense to add this
> if it wasn't used for Nautilus. 

We've had both nautilus and deskbar integration since pretty much the 
first release (ie almost 9 months ago)


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/