Re: [Tracker] Review request : Bridge manager subsystem

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 18/08/09 10:29, Ivan Frade wrote:
> Hi!

Hi :)

> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com
> <mailto:martyn lanedo com>> wrote:
>
>     No program. The idea was that miners are started from .desktop files
>     on start up and kept alive the whole time. Carlos and I discussed
>     this yesterday. The applet that lets the user know what is going on
>     with miners would only list miners that are running. Any other
>     miners wouldn't be listed (initially). We could get around that by
>     crawling the dbus services directory to see what other
>     org.freedesktop.tracker.Miner.* services are available but not
>     running and show those in a unique way of course.
>
>
> My idea of the applet: When you click on the applet, you should see only
> the miners "Active in DBus" with their status. When you go to
> preferences of the applet, then you have there all possible miners
> (discovered from .service files) and check boxes to enable/disable them.

Precisely what we have in mind.

>     I don't think we need a management binary for all miners. Ultimately
>     they should *each* know how and when to get their data and the only
>     thing that matters after that is the user being able to
>     start/stop/pause/etc them.
>
>
>   Miners should offer a "mandatory" DBus interface with those methods
> (e.g. org.freedesktop.tracker.Miner.Control, with methods like
> Pause/Resume/GetStatus). They can have more interfaces, of course, but
> that one is mandatory.

Yes, they will, but it will be in tracker.Miner, not a Control 
extension. At least I see no real need for that.

>   About the "life cycle" of the miners: Who/when/where start the miners?
> they are installed in the system, but are started with the user session.
> And each user has his own processes. Maybe we need a small extra program
> (tracker-session) to wake them up when the user logs in.

This is quite interesting.

Carlos and I just had a lengthy discussion about the API and what we are 
thinking about doing here. I will continue with the API ideas to the 
"Discussing the API of libtracker-miner" thread.

But I can't see any reason why miners can't stay resident the whole 
time. With the desktop files, that is the only way they get started 
right now and I don't think we should need a "manager" to do this. Also 
I think the applet shouldn't have to be running for miners to do their 
jobs, so really they should either be running 100% of the time or have a 
manager AFAICS. I don't think it is a problem if miners are always 
running. Do people disagree here?

When people log in, they are launched anyway based on the desktop file 
configuration. That's currently how tracker-store and tracker-miner-fs work.

--
Regards,
Martyn