Re: Confused about the release

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi Federico,

On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 16:26 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> With the inclusion of gnome-documents, we are validating Tracker as
> *the* metadata store for Gnome.

Kind of yeah; Tracker is pretty much an unique technology in the
platform though and I don't see many alternatives.

> Tracker has many implications, and I would like to see a good
discussion
> of whether it is the right thing for Gnome.

Can we please think about it as "does Tracker allow me to implement an
innovative application that wasn't possible before" rather than "is
Tracker useful for Gnome"? Something like Documents would be a lot
harder to implement without Tracker's help.

Anyway most of the questions have been answered already by Martyn and
Jasper, so I only have a couple of points.

> - Are we storing full-text indexes in the same database?

Right now Documents doesn't use the full text search capabilities of
Tracker.

> - Are we storing non-metadata (e.g. contacts) in the database?

Documents makes use of the contact ontologies to display author
information for indexed document files, and the GDocs miner stores there
the same author information as provided by the server. These are usually
triples in the format

mailto:foo@bar a nco:Contact
mailto:foo@bar nco:fullname "Foo Bar"
urn:my-resource nco:author mailto:foo@bar

The Contacts application doesn't store or read anything in Tracker as
far as I know, but goes through libfolks.

> - Is Tracker well-maintained now that Nokia is switching to something
> else? (I'm not sure if this is the right question, but something along
> those lines.)

I have to say the Tracker team has been very responsive to my questions,
and bugs got quickly fixed when I reported them.

Cheers,
Cosimo