Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 06/11/09 10:07, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 10:41:42AM +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 17:21 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > > On 29/10/09 15:23, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> >
> > > I agree it needs fixing, but there are a number of things to consider here:
> > >
> > >    - FANotify is being worked on by Red Hat and will be in the kernel for
> > >      us to use at some point - and we will adopt it then (I believe it
> > >      almost made it into the latest Fedora but didn't so should be in the
> > >      next release)
> > >
> > >    - We changed the locations that are indexed by default from $HOME to
> > >      use XDG user dirs for documents, desktop, music, pictures and videos.
> > >      So the focus has changed slightly to the things you most likely want
> > >      indexed instead of EVERYTHING. Of course adding EVERYTHING into the
> > >      config doesn't escape the fact that inotify is limiting us.
> >
> > This is kind of nice. Would it be possible to in addition to these
> > monitor $HOME non-recursively? Or maybe just one level down? That way
> > you would get most "typical" documents, but not descend into huge source
> > trees or whatnot.
>
>    This is unwise, IMO. Every person I know, when have to deal with many
> documents, organise them in hierarchical directories. Often few levels
> deep. Limiting indexer only to toplevel and one level below top will
> effect in missing much of the documents.

This very much depends on the user and how they make use of their $HOME 
directory. Alex is right for the most part. Tracker is clever enough to 
know where there are configuration duplicates too, so if the config has 
&DOCUMENTS (using the XDG spec to know where they are), it will realise 
that it is in $HOME/Documents (on Ubuntu at least) and *recursively* 
index those. Now if we do $HOME 2 levels deep, it means we catch all the 
other places where we created odd directories off $HOME. It is still 
entirely possible to index recursively $HOME and I don't see any problem 
with that. The exception is when people have a crazy number of files.

>    Conversely, people who can live with all documents in single directory
> probably don't have many documents. For them, indexer isn't much help.

I couldn't disagree more :)

People who put their documents all in one place are usually users that 
don't care so much WHERE they end up and just want to save them in the 
default location. Ultimately, if you don't care about the hierarchy of 
your documents, the indexer becomes more beneficial when you want to 
find something (only with a lot of documents I agree).

This all depends on people's way of working. I have started using the 
tracker-search-bar applet a lot more. I find it incredibly useful for 
finding that document when on a call or quickly. On this note, I 
recently updated it to search based on keystroke timeouts so it has 
interactive searching and the queries are better too, listing the top 5 
ranking documents.

--
Regards,
Martyn