Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

> Now that, I think, a lot more people know about Tracker because of this
> thread, the best way to move forward isn't to push for inclusion in the
> next release, since there's a fair amount of resistance to the idea, but
> rather to move ahead and attempt to develop the technology with the
> support of the incredible GNOME community.

I have been using tracker for a few months (since the move to sqlite)
and think it is great. I also use Beagle (for email searches, and
because its result tiles are more useful).

I was under the impression that (features aside) because Tracker is
written in C, there is greater chance that it could end up lower in
the GNOME stack.

Yes it has a DBus interface, and for 'search type' apps (nautilus,
deskbar, etc)  which query it DBus is probbably the easiest interface.
However if it comes into the platform then I look forward to seeing
some kind of libtracker-gtk library being written with;
* A tagging widget
* A media browsing widget (a treeview with Video, Music, Pictures,
like the one you see in all apple iApps)
* A tile derived widget for displaying a files metadata
* Generic treeview/iconview/tile results widget
* RDF manipulation functions
* lots of other crack

> So, rather than a Beagle vs. Tracker flamewar, let's hijack this thread
> into a discussion on how indexed metadata fits into our future vision
> for the GNOME desktop, and talk about how additional integration points
> in the existing GNOME application set might improve the user experience.

I think this is the chicken and the egg problem. If tracker comes into
GNOME then that gives application authors a central place to store and
lookup tags and metadata about objects.

Being in GNOME gives the incentive/reason for a libtracker-gtk to
exist, and it has the potential to make GNOME, desktop wide, more
integrated.

I suppose I can more clearly see the possibilities, and a roadmap on
how to get there if Tracker is in GNOME.

John