Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 10:49 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 10:56 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 08:58 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > I desperately need an indexer for help documents in Yelp.  Yelp
> > currently has two search backends: one based on Beagle and one
> > that basically greps everything every time you search.  Beagle
> > seems dead, and the other backend was never really intended to
> > be the way forward.
> > 
> > I had hoped to talk to somebody at the Summit about this, but
> > the right people weren't there.
> > 
> > I get the impression that the focus is more on data storage
> > than indexing these days.  I respect what the Tracker folks
> > are trying to do, but I just need a good indexer to enable
> > full-text search in Yelp.
> 
> Surely apps should ship pre-indexed help files? Or at least do the
> indexing at install time when installing from tarballs.

All right.  Is there a suitable open format for that?  We'll
need to be able to merge multiple indexes, even in a single
document.  We'll need to be able to generate these indexes
at build time without introducing insane dependencies.  And
we'll potentially need to be able to invalidate portions of
the system-installed index if we override pages.

I'm not wholly opposed to building indexes at build time and
installing them.  (I am, however, opposed to calling something
at install time that builds them.)  But even then I'd prefer
to be able to build off an existing indexing system.  I don't
have a whole lot of experience with this, and I'd rather let
people who know what they're doing do what they know.

--
Shaun