Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Michael Meeks <michael meeks novell com>]

Hi Jamie,

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 11:32 -0400, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> > Couldn't you just make gio (or gedit or OpenOffice) notify you every
> > time it closes a file instead of monitoring bazillions of files? I'm
> > not very likely to search for files I've never opened anyway.
>
> we could use the Gtk Recent files stuff for this and that would work for
> ordinary users but not devs fetching source code or other command line
> stuff

	As of today, I've not seen a good Linux filing system that can cope
with directory crawling [ particularly for the initial indexing ], even
at low I/O priority, without unpleasantly degrading system performance.
I imagine the sheer seek cost of pulling all those dentries, inodes into
memory, and evicting all the other useful data you had around - is a big
part of the plague. Hopefully btrfs will improve the situation somewhat
here, but wrt. inode / dentry management I suspect there is no really
good solution.

	Why does that matter ? well - I am sure that we could make a really
really good indexing & querying meta-data foo-matic thing, like beagle
or tracker: that would handle what people want rather well: searching
and monitoring their documents, contacts, IM logs, E-mail, web history
and so on.

	Unfortunately, as soon as we have this, it is only a small
feature-creep step to "lets index all .c/.h files to extract comments in
the API documentation" - which (I suspect) then commits you to the
disaster of irritating a lot of developers - so they turn it off, and
getting bogged down indexing things no-one is ever going to want indexed
by tracker (?).

	Personally, I'd start by ignoring any directory tree with a configure*
script in the top-level, or perhaps a .git / .svn directory - that
should reduce the inotify pain :-)

	So - my point is: are the devs fetching source code at the console -
that you are concerned about above, really in the target audience for
tracker ? and if so why ? inevitably they will use ctags or equivalent -
ie. a tight, generic end-user focused scope is prolly a win.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael meeks novell com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot