Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:

   My initial understanding of the Zeitgeist engine was that it was
   a data collection engine to collect a rich view of how the user
   used their computer over time, which would then be used to build
   an OLPC style journal interface; but that understanding fuzzes
   at the edges when people are pressed about this, things like
   deducing related documents from temporal overlaps and tagging
   enter into the picture. This doesn't make me comfortable.

   There are also questions here of the relationship with Tracker. If
   Tracker really lives up to its promise, shouldn't timeline
   information simply be extra metadata added in the Tracker store;
   after all, a timeline really is just an indexed and extended
   view of the classic ctime/mtime/atime metadata?

Indeed certain queries can be solved using only Tracker, others using only Zeitgeist. As Mikkel and Seif explained, both projects are complementary. I would explain it as: tracker is your current information, Zeitgeist is the journal of how you got there.

   If querying the Tracker database for this is a) not sufficiently
   efficient b) too cumbersome to code c) requires expert training
   in RDF, then that, to me, would throw doubt on the whole Tracker
   enterprise.

Not at all.

a) In our tests, tracker is efficient with a huge amount of data (e.g. 5000 contacts with postal addresses). I'll commit in the repository the scripts to run generate mock data and run these tests.
b) The DBus API is minimal (basically, one method for query, other for update), and
c) the query language looks very new, but it is way easier than SQL once you get few basic notions.

We are very happy to help new-comers to tracker, and started drafting some documentation. If there is any concrete point anybody wants to clarify, feel free to come and talk in #tracker.
 

   What would make us most comfortable would be a comprehensive
   picture of how Tracker, Zeitgeist, and Nautilus work together
   with the shell to allow finding your stuff. Now it is probably
   not completely realistic for me to hang await for this to show
   up in my inbox in finished form, so the first step (from my
   technical perspective) is to get a clear statement of what the
   Zeitgeist engine does, what new user interfaces are enabled by
   that operation, what it does *not* do, and how it relates to
   Tracker.

I will be in the Zeitgeist hackfest next week to work on clarify these limits. Hopefully somebody from GNOME Shell and Nautilus will be there too.

Regards,

Ivan