Re: Proposed module: tracker

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

11 jan 2007 kl. 12.09 skrev Emmanuele Bassi:

Hi,

> On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 23:39 +1300, John Stowers wrote:
> > > People got excited by Bonobo 6 years ago, I know I did. We looked  
> > > for
> > > all sorts of places Bonobo could be used and we made them use Bonobo
> > > even when Bonobo wasn't in any way the best solution. We are now
> > > suffering for that excitement.
> >
> > This is the second time the bonobo comparison has been made.
> >
> > Developers got excited about bonobo - users thought they were  
> > monkeys.
> > What we have here is a HEAP of excited users screaming for desktop
> > search. I dont think the two situations can be compared at all.
>
> bonobo was created because "heaps of excited users" were screaming for
> embedding controls between applications.  so the comparison perfectly
> fits.

I really don't see a comparison with Bonobo relevant.

Bonobo was hardly driven by users but desktop and application  
developers. Looking back, Bonobo got over used and pushed in areas  
where it was wrong, and much due to people being overly excited about  
it and wanted to use it everywhere. But if we use "it was driven by  
heaps of excited users" as a criteria for pulling projects into this  
discussion we can pull in a vast number of them, many which turned  
out to be great to be used to argue for inclusion of Tracker.

Further more, Bonobo was integrated on a whole different level and  
exposed in public APIs. This has made hard or even impossible to get  
rid of it when it turned out to be the wrong decision. Bonobo also  
affected application design to a great extent which made it a lot of  
work to replace it. I don't see how these problems are relevant when  
it comes to Tracker.

From what I can see, adding Tracker (or any other search engine/ 
library) is a much lower risk than converting the desktop to use  
Bonobo. Most importantly we can replace it later without impact on  
the users by providing migration tools for the meta data stored in  
the Tracker database.

Finally, I'm not arguing for or against Tracker here, I can't say I  
know it well enough to do so from a technical stand point. I would  
however be interested to hear a discussion where Tracker and Beagle  
are compared since they seem to fill the same hole.

Best Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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