Re: [Tracker] Roadmap to 0.7

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 10/07/09 13:18, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 12:54 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> well the new language would be for new features as well as replacing old
> ones. Like you said we want more power to be exposed however that will
> take time. I also want to widgetise everything so we can reuse them in
> other tools like a tracker powered file manager

To be honest, the current UI is:

- Broken
- Badly written
- Irrelevant

In the current context of 0.7. Rewriting it would be hugely more 
efficient use of time here. Integrating new and old will just waste more 
time in my opinion.

Plus, if you look at tracker-explorer, you can see how easy it is to 
knock up a UI quickly using a higher level language like Vala.

> > Just a quick question, I suppose I could look this up anyway :) but
> > doesn't the FTS module use the old ontologies? It occurred to me the
> > other day that it could be the same unless Jurg has updated it.
> >
> > > I wrote the fts rank funtion but it needs to be use the correct metadata
> > > weight and be exposed by spqarql so I can order results by rank
> > Right, sounds like the same point I make above.
>
> well the rank function when I wrote it just  used weight = 1 with a
> comment to use metadata weight once we knew where it would come from.
> Juerg needs to update that and expose that function in sparql
>
> > > the rank function simply sums (weight * number of occurences) as fts
> > > stores the positions and hence we known number of occurrences in the
> > > index
> > >
> > > for search tool I also need FTS snippets function to  be exposed by
> > > sparql (its in fts and I modded it to be efficient)
> > Well, we should be able to do this now already, I mean, if you look at
> > the newly added tracker-sparql man pages :) then you can see some
> > examples there. Also tracker-search uses FTS so you should probably look
> > at that too.
>
> I dont see it there nor is it in tracker-sparql-query.vala

What branch are you using, we are now on master!

> we need fts:rank and fts:snippet to be exposed by sparql query. This is
> one for Juerg to do

Jurg, any comment to add here?

> > Well zeitgeist is potentially going to be good for us to show off
> > Tracker and so we should accommodate them where possible of course.
>
> yes but we dont want it to suck due to results being relayed via dbus
> from tracker-store to zeitgeit to gnome apps. That would make tracker
> look much slower than it is?

Well, people can see for themselves that tracker is fast or slow, using 
another app on top of that really is another issue and we shouldn't be 
worried about this. We have had the same problems on the Maemo platform 
this year and we (the tracker team) have had to assist applications to 
make them faster and more efficient with queries. I expect we 
could/would do the same with the zeitgeist guys.

> Common sense says its better and faster to let gnome apps get stuff from
> tracker directly

Well, I don't know enough about what they plan to do here of course but 
actually, we do need higher level APIs and higher level libraries to 
make things easier for some applications on the desktop. I don't think 
dbus is that slow anyway and on the Maemo platform we do this 
effectively anyway with MAFW proxying Tracker. I don't see it as a problem.

--
Regards,
Martyn