Re: Proposed module: tracker

[Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com>]

Joe Shaw wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 20:47 +0100, Steve Fr�naux wrote:
> > Jamie McCracken wrote:
> >
> > > 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.
> > In that case, could it be used as a metadata storage for application 
> > data concerning files ? Such applications are nautilus or gedit or evince...
> >
> > Also, didn't rhythmbox have a project to use tracker as its music 
> > database ? What's the status of it ?
>
> I'm not sure I understand this world view.  People in this thread have
> been saying things like, "We need a metadata solution."  But I haven't
> seen anyone yet articulate what the "metadata problem" is, or how
> Tracker specifically is supposed to solve it.

Well, gedit has a "metadata store" which is actually a xml file stored 
in ~. It contains things like highlighting selected for files (nothing 
complex). But it suffers from concurrent access issues, and that's why 
gedit is a "single instance app". Also, these information can't be 
shared among applications.

Using an indexer would also allow things like tracking file operations 
(moves and copies). Currently, you loose the highlighting if you rename 
the file (ask ruby devs, for which .rhtml has no mime-type, what they 
think of this kind of "bugs").

For rhythmbox the issue is different, it's just searching multimedia files.

I don't know if tracker fits the problem, or if other software would. I 
don't know these softwares and I don't vote on this matter because I 
don't know, so I just ask questions ;-). Actually I'm only interested in 
a "metadata store" as described previously, I'm not interested in search 
at all.