Re: [Tracker] ANNOUNCE: tracker 0.6.94 released

[Martyn Russell <martyn imendio com>]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 10:55 +0800, Xin Lai wrote:
> ä 2009å04æ27æ 23:36, Philip Van Hoof åé: 
> > On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 22:41 +0800, Jerry Tan wrote:
> >   
> > > Hi, Martyn,
> > >
> > > Is the push-mode evolution plugin works now for 0.6.94?

Hi all,

I did reply to this mail yesterday, but it is lost in the ether
somewhere?

No, the plugin is now disabled.

> > No, because we have several difficulties with it, it has been disabled. 
> >
> > It'll be re-enabled during 0.7.x. You can enable it manually in the
> > release by passing a configure.ac switch, but you might see your indexer
> > become slow during the initial index of the E-mails if your user has a
> > large E-mail folder.

> >   
> Hi,
> I build tracker through ./configure with this option
> --enable-evolution-push-module. In this case I think evolution plugin
> is enabled, isn't it? 

Yes, but it has been explicitly disabled, even using that flag it won't
work.

> But evolution plugin in all of tracker0.6.9* doesn't work. The
> statistics is 0 for Emails and Evolution Emails after executing
> tracker-stats when "Enable evolution email indexing" has been checked.

Yes that's right.
   
> After analyzing the code of evolution plugin, I found that it is the
> problem of tracker_data_update_replace_service. Here is the process:
> all of the changes in evolution are sent to registrar ( the trackerd)
> by the method call "SetMany" through dbus. Then registrar ( the
> trackerd) sends a method message "SetMany" to tracker-indexer. The
> main process function for this in tracker-indexer is perform_set in
> which tracker_data_update_replace_service is invoked. However in
> tracker_data_update_replace_service there is not actual process of
> Emails. After NULL is returned by g_hash_table_lookup (metadata,
> "File:Modified"), the function returns.
>
> So for me tracker-indexer is not slow but doesn't work at all even
> though my email folder is small. Is it something wrong with my
> configuration ? or just tracker itself?

No you are right the "File:Modified" missing metadata is the reason why
it is:

a) fast
b) not working

> If there's any place which I have misunderstood, please feel free to
> correct me.

Philip and I worked on this yesterday and managed to put in a fix by
using the current time as the "File:Modified" value so it would pass the
next function. However, doing this meant the indexer was completely
saturated with calls to the database from this module. The problem is,
this plugin doesn't liaise with the indexer properly, so it ignores any
pausing/queueing/etc. What this means in practise is, the indexer is
unresponsive to DBus requests. As such the plugin/indexer needs
extensive work/testing to queue these requests and put them into the
database properly. Since we are now on the fifth release of stable
software, I deemed it a bad idea to add code like this so late in the
game.

Yesterday I added code which disables the plugin by default and also
adds the code to make email indexing work in #if 0 preprocessor
conditions. If you want to change this, go ahead, at your peril :)

The other reason why we are not going to fix this is because the 0.7
branch operates in a different way making any patch we write here
redundant. I think our time is better spent on the 0.7 branch for this
and so it won't be fixed in the 0.6 branch.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn