Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Paolo Maggi wrote:
> Hi Jamie,
>
> > 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,
>
> How is it related to beagle?

it only overlaps on the indexing front - everything else is different 
though as far as I can tell

> Which are the pro and cons of using it as a desktop search solution with
> respect to beagle or other existing solution (if any)?

I cant comment too much on Beagle cause the last version I tried almost 
a year ago was unusable on my 256mb machine.

I can highlight tracker's strengths though :

1) Low memory usage. If started with option --enable-low-memory we can 
peg memory usage to between 3-6MB. Without that option its typically 
twice that but with much faster indexing.

2) High speed indexing with the --turbo option

3) High speed search - average under 20ms

+ whole load of stuff that tracker can do that beagle cant (while it 
remains a dedicated indexer that is) -extensible metadata which can be 
mixed and match with full text search so you can easily search for 
everything with a full text search  of "Penguin" against a tag "zoo". We 
do this effortlessly with our powerful rdf query support.

You can even define indexable metadata that will show up in full text 
searches.


> > extensible 
> > metadata server and next generation first class object database all in
> > 100% C code.
>
> This is nice. We really need a central metadata server in GNOME (many
> apps are using in-house solutions to store metadata, see nautilus,
> gedit, evince, etc.)
>
> > 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.
>
> It seems beagle have a nice GUI for searching, would it be easy/possible
> to copy/port this GUI using Tracker as backend (maybe implementing
> libbeagle-like API on Tracker)?

Not really as we are quite different.

There are some things in common which should be abstracted though but 
because a lot of python stuff is using tracker via dbus we would ideally 
need beagle to implement a shared dbus interface which Im more than 
jappy to cooperate with (mono now has some good dbus bindings so this 
should be doable)

Tracker can also be run as a standalone metadata database by passing the 
--disable-indexing option to it so if you want to use beagle you can 
without overlapping.


A screenshot of tracker's initial GUI :

http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-search-tool.png

In future versions we will expose tags, extensible metadata and allow 
mixing of metadata and full text searches.

> Which are the data sources and file formats supported by Tracker?

all the major files types and their metadata is supported (images, docs, 
music etc)

> Is it easy to extends Tracker to add support for new data sources and
> file formats? Where can we find more info about how to extend Tracker?

fairly - full text filters are simply shell scripts and metadata 
extractors can be easily added (to the tracker-extract program)


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