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

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 18:38 -0400, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> 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.
>
yes, it might be too big. At canonical, for ubuntu karmic, we have
reduced the dependencies (erlang runtime) to the minimum (5-6 MB IIRC),
which is ok for a desktop machine, but I guess it's still too big for
nokia's smaller devices?

And of course, couchdb should always be optional. It makes sense to use
it as a storage for sharing data between applications (evolution and
akonadi are both using it to store contacts, which gives us shared data
storage for both GNOME and KDE users. ditto for firefox/epiphany for
bookmarks, evo/tomboy for notes, etc, etc), but the big point about it
is to allow replication of the data to other machines, which might not
be what some users want. So yeah, should still be optional

In fact, I see the tracker integration, if it happens in a GNOME-wide
aspect, like this: applications use tracker to store data, and there is
a global setting to allow users to specify where to store data, locally,
or on couchdb, which would give the replication/synchronization feature,
without changing any application, which would still use tracker to store
their data.

>  I dont know a great deal about CouchDb but feel
> free to sell it to Nokia if you can :)
> 
well, I'm a simple developer, I'll let the selling to the sales
people :D Although technically it would make a lot of sense, since data
saved in the nokia devices would get replicated to whatever couchdb
remote instance the user has, and appear automatically on the user's
desktop, without having to synchonize by hand the nokia device with the
PC. I think that's a good way to sell it to Nokia :D