Re: Tracker, Zeitgeist, Couchdb...where is the problem ?

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 00:27 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 16:48 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > I think this recent discussion about tracker as a gnome module is
> > somewhat backwards. I don't think it is leading us anywhere to talk
> > about ontologies and rdf and events and timelines and metadata stores
> > and kernel apis before we answer the first question:
> > 
> > What is the user problem that we are solving here ?
> > Can that be described in a paragraph ?
> > And if it can, is it something that a 'regular' user would recognize
> > as a problem he has on his computer ?
> > 
> > Once we have the problem scoped out, we need to look at the user
> > experience we want to aim for in solving it. Will it be a single
> > search-for-everything dialog ? A query language ? Tagging everywhere ?
> > 
> > After that, it might be possible to evaluate whether tracker,
> > zeitgeist, couchdb or something else can be part of the
> > implementation...
> > 
> couchdb provides just the storage of any kind of data, no indexing,
> searching, etc, so I think they solve different problems. In fact,
> tracker could just use local files as storage or a couchdb database. If
> using couchdb, it would get replication and synchronization for free,
> but it would still provide the indexing


For your interest, I did want to use CouchDb for our backup of user
metadata in tracker precisely for that reason. Currently we use turtle
files which is not optimal. 

However I suspect CouchDb is big and probably too big a dependency for
nokia's smaller devices so it might not happen or would have to be
optional in tracker. I dont know a great deal about CouchDb but feel
free to sell it to Nokia if you can :)

jamie