Re: Confused about the release

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 01/09/11 14:41, Cosimo Cecchi wrote:
> Hi Federico,

Hi Cosimo,

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

Interesting, but actually we also want a more "file-less" approach to 
the desktop without having to worry about where things are stored. 
Tracker does help accomplish this to some extent.

Quite often I spent time worrying about where files are saved or where I 
can find them and it's a huge waste of time IMO if the desktop can 
facilitate this for me in a more economic way.

> 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.

There are some interesting ideas on the roadmap here too, we've 
considered updating to FTS-4 (currently -3 is in use) - the impact 
should be insignificant to users of Tracker and in some cases 
performance would increase impressively according to what's boasted of 
the technology.

There is also room for improvement there in Tracker, it's the least 
developed aspect of the project right now. Certainly features like 
"snippet" support can be improved to allow apps to show snippets of text 
found through a query (currently problematic translating between 
coordinates in stored text and the actual file itself, but not 
insurmountable).

> > - 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

Yea, we do with documents we find too. Which makes sense.

> 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.

It would be really nice to have integration here IMO. I heard that 
libfolks works with Tracker, but to what extent, I don't know.

> > - 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.

:)

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.