Re: New module proposal: tracker

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 22:25 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> But in previous GNOME release we accepted stuff like PolicyKit or
> DeviceKit or PulseAudio while not yet officially released or widely
> adopted. And those stuff was needed to be installed under /usr in order
> to properly work.

I believe all of these things are (optional) dependencies, not anything
part of the GNOME desktop proper. Except for maybe PulseAudio. Solaris,
for example, don't use any of this stuff.

> Tracker, instead, can be simply tested in a JHbuild sandbox.
> 
> So this doesn't seem to me a reason to drop its inclusion.

I'm with Zeeshan on this - what's the harm of delaying the inclusion of
Tracker until it has actually proven itself to be useful for Linux
Desktop uses? (In my view, Maemo isn't a typical Linux Desktop)

Not to sound like an asshole or anything but, I mean, didn't distros try
including Tracker by default in previous releases? AFAIR, it didn't
really work well. So if GNOME included Tracker in the next release and
core parts of GNOME started depending on it in a way that couldn't be
turned off... then distros would be in a lot of trouble if Tracker
didn't work well. This would probably end up reflecting badly on the
GNOME project.

Instead, I'd be a lot more thrilled if the Tracker developers would
suggest Tracker as an optional dependency (just like e.g. polkit is.. or
at least used to be) - e.g. apps using Tracker would have need a
--disable-tracker or --enable-tracker configure option. This way we can
start integrating Tracker into GNOME without causing the ride to be too
bumpy.

Thanks,
David