Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

["Jos van den Oever" <jvdoever gmail com>]

2006/10/23, Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>:
> Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > Hi all,
>
> Hi Jos, great to have you in on this discussion.
Thanks Jamie, glad to join in.

> First to clarify, tracker is not a dedicated indexer (like Beagle and
> Strigi) but is first and foremost a database which has indexing as a
> side feature.
>
> Our metadata store (sqlite) is quite separate from our full text indexer
> (QDBM) which can be deleted if not required - the data there is just as
> expendable as in Strigi's and Beagle's case. No metadata is "stored" in
> the full text indexer although indexable metadata is of course indexed
> in it.
That's interesting and good to know. It makes good sense. I thought
everything was stored in a headless mysql. I didn't know you switched
to sqlite and QDBM.

I wont comment on the general data storage further. This is a feature
Strigi does not have and will not have. This is mainly to keep the
focus on indexing. For storing and searching in additional metadata
another program would be required alongside Strigi. Currently, the
Mandriva sponsored project Nepomuk is promising and colaborating with
them on a genaral storage API in DBus seems like a good idea to me.

> > Now that DBus v1 is almost upon is, the barriers between GNOME and KDE
> > are diminishing. Functionality defined by a DBus API can by
> > implemented in any language and as such, I think GNOME should choose a
> > DBus API to use and share with KDE and
>
> yes this is my desire also.
>
> we should have a org.freedesktop.indexer interface that we can all
> share. Implementation specific stuff can then reside in their own unique
> interfaces

Exactly. I will write a first draft and submit it to freedesktop.org.
The draft will encompass metadata type definition and a search API. It
will require quite a bit of discussion I think, but we'll just see.
It's important to keep it simple and easily implementable I think, so
that we can do more work on tests and code.

> I agree from the indexing point of view but Gnome requires a reference
> implementation to be available - in cases where there have been multiple
> cases, Gnome has always blessed one (EG Epiphany vs Galeon) but that
> does not mean distros use the blessed one  (EG Firefox is more likely to
> be used as the dominant web browser even though I think Epiphany is
> better in a Gnome setting)

I dont agree that a reference implementation has to be present. The
programs should be able to deal with the case where no implementation
is present. Some computers simply wont have an index and the GUI
should simple leave out the possibilty for searching via an index in
such cases. If a service is running the GUI should show it, but if
there is none, no harm should be done.

Cheers,
Jos