Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 11:57 -0400, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 16:44 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > On 18/08/09 16:07, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > > On Tue, 18.08.09 13:05, Martyn Russell (martyn lanedo com) wrote:
> > > Hmm. The beef I have with Tracker (and Beagle fwiw) is that they build
> > > something on infrastructure that currently is not good enough
> > > to sustain it: inotify. inotify is simply not suitable for recursively
> > > watching $HOME, but Tracker tries that nonetheless. And that is a big
> > > big failure, it should not do that.
> > 
> > I agree the situation isn't perfect, but it isn't a BIG failure.
> > 
> > Currently Red Hat's Eric Paris is working on this with fanotify:
> > 
> >    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/fanotify
> > 
> > There are more links from Google of course.
> > 
> > > There's something I like to call the "tracker paradox": if you have
> > > a large data set tracker is useless because inotify doesn't scale and
> > > the database is quickly out-of-date -- and if you have a small data
> > > set then you don't need a search engine and hence tracker is useless
> > > too.
> > 
> > Well, that really depends on the user and the data set. Most "normal" 
> > users don't have 10 versions of the linux kernel checked out causing 
> > these inotify limits to be reached. With ALL my music and external 
> > drives I don't have a problem with the limit at all. It seems that only 
> > people with the whole of GNOME checked out into $HOME seem to run into 
> > these cases.
> > 
> 
> Ideally this could be solved by the file miner checking to see if a
> directory contains a hidden .svn or .git folder that houses a repository
> and automatically skip that folder sub tree
> 
> Most devs will use grep rather than tracker for searching source files
> anyhow and I have never come across a situation where indexing soure
> repositories is useful (there may be corner cases of course)

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008#HowdoyouuseGit.3F

There are people who use git for personal data and documents
and such.  You can also use it as a fairly effective backup
system.  Please don't assume that the presence of a .git
directory means that you're dealing with code.

--
Shaun