Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 09:18 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On 02/11/09 22:59, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> I dont want to comment too much on zeitgeist but AFAIK all querying,
> tagging and event logging can be done in the tracker DB. A tracker
> miner could be created to perform such logging although it seems the
> zeitgeist team want to use a python daemon instead. 

Hrrm, I need to read this ML more often :-\

> > I personally would like to merge zeitgeist functionality into tracker
> > but really its up to the zeitgeist team on whether they are willing to
> > do this (it would mean converting the python code to Vala/Genie or C as
> > well)
> 
> Why is that necessary? It should work with Python AFAIK.

Yes, I was also wondering what Jamie is talking about here.

It's perfectly fine to write a 'miner' for Tracker in Python. IF
performance is any problem, parts can be rewritten in another language,
sure.

Such 'miners' don't necessarily have to go into Tracker's repository and
project.

We want to get as much as possible of them into the project and grow a
big family of contributors and side-kick projects. Sounds like a lot of
fun to me! A good maintainer is what matters, not the language.

We're for example reviewing and working on Adrien Bustany's web miner
projects (facebook, flickr, etc) at this moment.

Adrien is using Vala for this project. You can follow up this progress
here: http://git.gnome.org/cgit/tracker/log/?h=miner-web


Hopefully we'll someday have a miner-zeitgeist branch like that, too.

Maybe some parts will be done in C, maybe in Vala, or Genie? And since a
miner just talks DBus and SPARQL UPDATE with tracker-store, it can also
be done in Python. That's fine. At least for me.

Maybe somebody should write a 'miner' in JavaScript someday? If that
person maintains it well, then that should be fine too.

As several people on this thread said before: all these language
discussions are bikeshedding. That's true for gnome-shell and for
Tracker too.


As for storage for the events: 

At least I wouldn't mind storing a compressed set of events (a cleaned
up table) coming from Zeitgeist, in Tracker's stores. It would mean that
we need to make a ontology for it. We can do that.

Then the Zeitgeist project, and other apps too, can query it over
SPARQL. And if SPARQL isn't sufficient we can add functions to the
language under a 'zeitgeist'-namespace, for example.

If the events are stored outside of Tracker's stores then it'll be more
difficult to integrate the fields in an existing SPARQL query.

What me and Seif discussed IRL as a possibility a few times is to let
Zeitgeist have its own massive store full of all the events, but then
synchronize some of the events to Tracker's store (for example a
storable conclusion, one that has a 'real query'-usecase).



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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