[Tracker] Tracker Support in Yelp

[Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>]

Hi,

Since tracker has (possibly) been proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.18,
I figured now would be a good time to ask.  Are there any plans / would
it be possible to add support for searching documentation for Yelp
(GNOME help browser)?

Currently, yelp uses either beagle (if its available and compiled in) or
its own "slow" search mechanism (which basically parses all the
documentation yelp knows about searching for the given words) [1].  Most
of the documentation is in docbook (XML) format [2].  Ideally, a tracker
backend would also be able to search man and info pages (though, yelp
can do this internally if necessary)[3].

To make this feasible, it would be great if the documentation index was
generated through the same mechanism yelp uses to generate its
table-of-content (i.e. through scrollkeeper.  Ugh).  That way, the
search results would include all the docs that yelp knows about, but no
extra docs [4].

I'd be willing to help out with getting this working (adding the backend
to yelp, answering any questions etc.  though I'm not familiar with the
tracker codebase), if you're interested.

The other advantage [5] would be that if the documentation was tagged
with "docs" or something, the search tool would be able to launch yelp
with the relevant document (and correct section), when the result was
displayed.

Thanks
Don

[1] It isn't really slow.  A lot of work has been done to keep speeds
acceptable.  It's not as fast as a dedicated searching engine though.

[2] Some docs may be in html.  We don't really support anything else

[3] This is the slow part of the internal search

[4] This is something beagle seems to fail badly at.  It returns a lot
of stuff that isn't normally displayed in yelp.  It is getting better
though.  It also displays the uri instead of the title, but that's a
different story.

[5] Possibly.  I'm thinking on my feet here ;)

[6] Sorry for all the footnotes.