Re: Finding and Reminding, tech issues, 3.0 and beyond

[Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals <siegfried gevatter com>]

Hey,

I'd like to provide some information in relation to the concerns
raised about information being stored separately in Zeitgeist and
Tracker. The example case of asking for "all music files played within
the last week" can be solved using only a single Zeitgeist query;
however, you are right that more complex requests currently can
require two separate calls, one to Tracker and one to Zeitgeist, which
is indeed suboptimal (but should work good enough if your queries are
reasonable).

Seif and me have just had an informal discussion with a couple Tracker
developers (Rob and Philip) to seek cooperation possibilities between both
projects, and there would be the option of migrating the current Zeitgeist
engine (with minimal visible changes) to using Tracker as a database
backend instead of having our own SQLite database. This would make it
possible to do SPARQL queries accessing Zeitgeist data (read-only) and
would also solve the problem of file renames/deletions (however performance
for the simple queries would get worse as this introduces additional D-Bus
roundtrips, etc).

This still needs to be discussed with other members of the Zeitgeist
team, but I think we could be persuaded toward it in case Tracker
becomes a hard dependency of GNOME (there's not much point in it if
there aren't significant applications using Tracker).

More elaborate solutions, moving more of the Zeitgeist functionality
into Tracker, are also possible, but not in a near future.

I also want to remember you that, shall you have any doubt related to
Zeitgeist, we'll be happy to hear from you in our IRC channel (#zeitgeist on
Freenode, #gnome-zeitgeist on GIMPnet) or mailing list [0]. Feedback is
always appreciated!

[0] http://lists.zeitgeist-project.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev

Regards,

-- 
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)
Free Software Developer       363DEAE3