[Tracker] From the client side

["Marko Anastasov" <marko anastasov gmail com>]

Hey all,

A few questions:

In practice, pulling every single document's (whatever type) metadata
from Tracker over D-Bus is slow. For example it takes 10+s on my 2 yr
old machine to gather information for about ~1000 documents.
How do you see this problem?

I really do not want to see that every time Paperbox starts any more,
so I think that I'm going to add a private SQLite database for caching
document information so that all documents can be displayed instantly,
while querying Tracker for updates will begin in the background.

I think that there must be a way to sync the metadata database
between desktops. It's just not good enough if copying a file on another
computer leaves you with blank metadata. I only have tags in my mind
now actually but what if Tracker actually stored other useful information
such as notes and reference URLs. So maybe an additional tool could
export the metadata database contents to some file, and on the other
desktop the tool would import the data for recognised files?

Do you think that writing metadata to files should generally be a task
for Tracker or applications? For example if a file belongs to a group
of mime types covered by the XMP, an image, and I tag it in t-s-t,
I think that the tags should be written to the file itself, then inferred
by the metadata store. Atm I think that it might be better to do it on
the Tracker side.

I see in trunk (tracker-daemon.xml) that there is a new signal
for "whenever the count of a category changed":
    <signal name="ServiceStatisticsUpdated">
      <arg type="aas" name="statistics"/>
    </signal>

Is this the signal for "there's a new file in index"? That's what's been
really missing IMO.

    Marko