[Tracker] Some observations about tracker 0.5.2



Hello all,

I very much welcome tracker, and look forward to seeing it grow (not so much literally, I hope!). After using 
it for a while, and exploring the code a bit, I have some thoughts to pass back to the dev's.

1. In keeping with the FD.O spirit, trackerd's configuration and "index" data might be moved from ~/.Tracker 
to locations in accord with standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest. Those places can readily be 
determined by g_get_user_config_dir() and its siblings. I assume it's practical to amend Makefile to move 
existing data to new places when upgrade happens.

2. If trackerd's initial data-trawl is interrupted, it seems that a full scan will not be completed unless 
the user manually deletes the database. Restarting trackerd after interruption just produces quite a few:
File /home/whome/tmp/Tracker-whome.10995/sqlite3-base/cache-journal has finished changing
and
Warning - file /home/whome/tmp/Tracker-whome.10995/sqlite3-base/cache-journal no longer exists - abandoning 
index on this file

It would be nicer to have a completion flag, and where appropriate, an offer to restart indexing, or better, 
to resume from where interrupted.

3. If trackerd is not interrupted, as the indexing gets further advanced I increasingly get blocks of 
back-to-back messages of the types listed in 2 above. Eventually they greatly-outnumber messages about data 
actually being processed. Is there some inotify-related optimisation needed there ?

4. The torrent of information produced when trackerd first indexes your data is useful for debugging, but it 
should be made optional now that tracker is going out into the wider community. The various levels of debug 
messages should all (or maybe, all except critical warnings) be tied to the "--enable-debug" configure 
option. If you must, debug mode could default to on, with a related "--disable-debug".

5. CVS includes several python files that don't appear in the release. Is there a problem with them ?

6. I haven't been able to find a systematic approach to running rdf queries, not even a default-search-path 
for rdf scripts. Does anyone know of a tool to facilitate script creation ?

7. For the future - the command-line utilities which interrogate index data must continue to support 
specification of search parameters in as much detail as for any GUI, e.g. and, or, not, phrase, anycase ... 
Probably, GOption will have to be sacrificed.

8. I understand that inclusion in gnome will require improved documentation. Some hints:
 - some of the command-line utilities don't support a --help parameter
 - Baptiste's initial manpage contributions need to be updated
 - tracker-search-tool and tracker-tag have no manpage

9. A while back there was some chatter about a replacement icon. Has anything been done ? If not, maybe the 
attached will start that ball rolling.

10. Closer alliance with gnome has some important benefits, but please try to keep tracker's essential 
DE-independence in front of packagers at least, so that users of xfce and the like (not to forget KDE users 
now that kat seems to be dead) are not dissuaded.

HTH
Tom

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