Re: Proposed module: tracker

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 19:33 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > Information about tracker:
> > http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/
>
> okay, I'll bite.
>
> +++

ouch !

> I have strong objections to the inclusion of tracker into GNOME 2.18.
>
> Actually, I have one strong objection, that is: what's proposed for
> inclusion and where?

glad to see thats your only *strong* objection - tracker and t-s-t are 
proposed as desktop modules

  If it's tracker-search-tool (the UI), I'd say that
> for what tracker *does* right now, there's no difference between tracker
> and gnome-search-tool in gnome-utils. 

well t-s-t is fast and instant and provides search snippets. It also 
allows search by object (Documents, Images, Music etc).

Also I would add that the  sophisticated snowball stemmers that tracker 
uses allow for more accurate searches - EG "Fly" and "Flies" will match 
against "Flying"

 If what's proposed for inclusion
> is tracker-the-indexer, then until we have a use for the indexer in more
> than one application, I'd wait for its inclusion; same goes for
> tracker-the-database.

um well Nautilus and Deskbar both have tracker support. So that makes 3 
apps (including t-s-t)

  I'd also like to see a tracker-library to access
> the data without having to implement the D-Bus calls into each and every
> application.

we have a c based libtracker but most of the apps that use tracker are 
python based and they prefer the native dbus but apps can choose between 
both

> I'd also like for tracker to become less of a moving target: in the past
> six months tracker changed the database backend twice (at least), API,
> UI; 

UI has not changed at all

its proposed for Desktop not platform so moving API should not be an issue

we support multiple backends in theory but have now standardised on 
sqlite and will remain with it.

I have only proposed it now as im confident tracker wont need any more 
*major* overhauls.


and it still indexes just plain text files, images and audio files,
> with all the interesting stuff (emails, contacts, im conversations,
> bookmarks, etc.) marked as TODO.

emails is 95% done as of today and we should have a release for that in 
a week or two

chat logs are on their way.

But as t-s-t is proposed as a replacement for g-s-t that should not 
matter (the latter being files based also)

> Above all, anyway, I'd like to be able to *not* use "tracker" as a catch
> all for indexer, database, search UI and API.

well we need something if we want to compete with Vista and OS/X.

in any event tracker can be configured to not index at all or only index 
metadata and/or contents. It can also be used a stand alone metadata DB 
so I think tracker should be flexible enough for most cases where you 
only want a subset of its features.

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