Re: [Tracker] a little bit of feedback

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 21/11/09 16:54, Tomi N/A wrote:
> Hi everyone,

Hi :)

> since I've just joined the mailing list, I'd like to say that tracker
> is a joy to use...when it works. ;-)

Glad to hear that!

> I have three observations I'd like to share in order to help make
> tracker better.

OK, it seems like you're using 0.6. I need to do another release a final 
stable release at some point. I think some of these issues may already 
be fixed there (tracker-0.6 branch).

> #1
> In spite of having used tracker for some time now, I've never been
> able to investigate why a certain (plain text) file was found in a
> seach and another isn't. It would go a long way in helping users
> understand the indexer's behaviour if there was some kind of log file
> which listed all of the files tracker intends to index, all of the
> files tracker attempted to index and the result of the attempt. As it
> stands, tracker has a couple of log files, but they don't seem useful.
> This is what they look like after a re-index (last night):

If you have verbosity set to 3, you should see EVERYTHING that it tries 
to index, everything it ignores, etc.

> $ ll ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker*log
> -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna 164719 2009-11-21 17:16
> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/trackerd.log

This lists all files we found which we want to index or ignore.

> -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna      0 2009-11-21 15:37
> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-extract.log

This shows WHAT was extracted from each file.

> -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna      0 2009-11-21 16:05
> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-indexer.log

This shows what we did in the database.

> -rw------- 1 tna tna   8446 2009-05-13 18:18
> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker.log

This looks like an old file unused now.
> $ head ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker*log
> ==>  /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/trackerd.log<==
>
> 20 Nov 2009, 12:41:13: Tracker-Warning **: Error loading
> query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in
> shared-cache mode
>
> 20 Nov 2009, 12:41:13: Tracker-Warning **: Error loading
> query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in
> shared-cache mode

This error is harmless IIRC. It has been silenced too I think in the 
tracker-0.6 branch.

> 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion
> `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed
>
> 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion
> `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed
>
> 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion
> `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed

Pretty sure this is fixed now.

> tna potjeh:~$
>
> The start of the files is representative of the rest of their content.
>
>
> #2
> Loads, and I mean loads of my files are missing. Tracker told me it
> intends to index cca. 85000 files in my home directory, but the number
> of files I have is closer to...let's see:

The logs might be misleading. The logs will say WHAT it wants to index 
but not everything gets indexed because we ignore particular files. Also 
a the files it intends to index are not a representation of how many you 
have, since if you create 20k files then that number will increase as it 
is working.

> $ locate home | wc -l
> 440551
> tna potjeh:~$
>
> I should point out that there are no users in /home other than myself.

It supports quite a range actually.

> I understand that tracker supports a limited set of file types, but I
> don't see a reason for it to not at least index the full path to a
> file, including it's name, regardless of the type.

It should be doing this in 0.6. I know we definitely do this in 0.7.

> I'm not sure how
> it's supposed to behave with files of an unknown type (because there's
> little visibility of what the indexer is doing),

Again, verbosity=3 shows a lot more information (almost spamming you 
with it) :)

> but the behaviour I
> see places tracker's coverage at just under 20% of the total number of
> files. Is it because of my disk usage (95% used, 11GB free)? I would
> definitely like to be able to answer questions like this by asking the
> tool or checking the logs.

Perhaps tracker-stats and tracker-files might be able to tell you more 
about which files are missing or what is going on here.

> #3
> It seems impossible to tell the indexer (via it's properties GUI) that
> it' should not index mounted disks without restarting the indexer. I
> would like not to restart the indexer and to store the preference for
> the next run, whenever it might happen.

This might be a bug which we have fixed but not released yet. Sounds 
reminiscent of one.

> What I see in the preferences GUI is that if I decline to restart the
> indexer, the "index mounted disks" property is silently reset to
> "true".

Hmm. I thought that was also fixed. What version of tracker are you using?

> There are also problems when using find-as-you-type within the
> deskbar-applet, but I don't believe this is the place to discuss those
> (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Hmm, not sure. We do maintain that (or did). What was the problem?

> So, in summary, I would heartily welcome a lot more visibility of
> tracker's activities (at least in some kind of a debug mode), would
> like to understand why 80+% of my files aren't indexed, which ones
> they are and would appreciate a small bug fix in the indexer
> preferences dialogue. :-)
>
> I'm running Ubuntu, currently 9.04, on a Pentium M with 2GB RAM.

Thanks for your feedback.

Out of curiosity, have you thought about trying 0.7? It is infinitely 
better.

--
Regards,
Martyn