Fwd: Migrating apps to Tracker 3

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

[resending a message which was blocklisted]

Hi release team and app maintainers!

As you know, we've updated and decentralized Tracker for the Flatpak
age, bringing some incompatible changes. Tracker 3 is in beta and ready
for GNOME 3.38.

I'm mailing the release team, and everyone who maintains a GNOME app
that depends on Tracker, because we want your opinion on how best to
coordinate the app porting.

This is important because once an app is ported to Tracker 3, it will
require the host OS to have Tracker 3 installed, and distros without
Tracker 3 will see apps start to break in Flatpak.

I see 3 options:

 Option 1: Deprecate Tracker 2 now and port all apps for GNOME 3.38.

   - We need to review and test app ports before 3.37.90 release (8th
     August), requiring some collaboration from app maintainers now.
   - Flatpak app releases will break on most non-rolling-release
     distros, e.g.  Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora 31 & 32, Debian 10.4, ...
       - We can provide PPA / COPR repos of tracker3 so users can work
         around the breakage.

 Option 2: Wait to port all apps until GNOME 3.40.

   - App maintainers will have until early 2021 to review and test with
     Tracker 3.
   - Distros have time to include tracker3 in a release, so that
     Flatpak app releases will keep working on Fedora 33 and Ubuntu
     20.10. They will still break on older / LTS releases without the
     user installing a backport of tracker3.
   - We have to maintain tracker 2.x for another 6 months

 Option 3: No deadline for porting apps, distros ship Tracker 2 and 3

   - No pressure on app maintainers, ports can be merged when 100% ready
   - If some apps depend on Tracker 2 and some on Tracker 3, users will
     have 2 indexers running at the same time. So we'd increase GNOME's
     resource consumption, consume 2x the number of inotify watches,
     people will start to make videos about how much we suck, etc. :)
   - It's unclear when we would stop maintaining Tracker 2.

Myself and Carlos like option 1. There are ports for many apps already:
see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Initiatives/-/issues/17. We are also
fine with option 2, but we have concerns about option 3.

The most important thing is we come up with a plan that everyone agrees
on, so please reply and let us know what you prefer!

I think https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Initiatives/-/issues/17 is the
best place to discuss this publically, so everyone can participate in
the discussion

Thanks :)
Sam