Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Chris Toshok <toshok hungry com>]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 10:12 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> 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.

I can't *really* speak for the mail idea, but storing mail in a db just
sounds like a bad idea to me, after seeing how much trouble people have
had finding (or writing) exporters and importers for various mail client
db files.  Mail can - and often does - live a lot longer than a file
format.

EDS can potentially use tracker as a backend (perhaps even replacing the
local file backends), but there's not enough overlap to warrant
replacing the entirety of EDS as both contacts/calendars can come from
servers.

Chris