Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 20:01 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Joe Shaw wrote:
> > While I don't want this to devolve into a Tracker vs. Beagle debate,
> > Beagle *is* worth mentioning because it is substantially ahead of
> > Tracker both in terms of functionality and maturity.  
> 
> Tracker is much more stable though from what people have told me - we 
> dont hang or crash or get stuck on docs. We also dont leak much. We
> are 
> very viable on lower end machines. Combined with our KISS approach,
> it 
> is a fairly well designed piece of software with relatively few 
> (critical) bugs.
> 
> Tracker is miles ahead on the database side (which is non-existant in 
> Beagle bar your backup for systems without EA's)- we have
> tags/keywords, 
> extensible metadata, first class object storage etc. Beagle is only 
> ahead on what it indexes and heres the big point - tracker's goal is
> not 
> to index everything under the sun but only the important stuff. 

I wonder what you consider to be important stuff.  I have a number
of types of files on my computer that I consider important.  They
are important to me, even other people don't think the file types
are important.

We can't possibly expect Tracker to handle every file format under
the sun.  Beagle doesn't, Spotlight doesn't, and I'm sure whatever
thing Vista is doing doesn't.  But what they provide is a way for
external application to provide indexers for their file formats.
And ISDs are doing this.  (Insert admonition about how we'd get
better third-party buy-in with a cross-desktop solution.)

Personally, I'm excited about having actual metadata alongside full
text indexes.  I think you can get much richer queries, and there's
more potential for application interaction.  But that also means we
have to allow even more flexibility for third-party integration.

I'm not saying Tracker can't do any of this.  I'm asking if it can.
Your proposal is sort of the buzzword-compliant boss version.  I'd
really like the hacker version.  What does Tracker actually do, and
what can we actually do with it?

--
Shaun