[Tracker] Roadmap for 0.12

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

Hi all,

This morning all the Tracker core developers had a meeting to discuss 
shaping up 0.12 releases ready for GNOME 3.2. We have drawn up a list of 
features and bugs we want to see in 0.12 before and around the GNOME 
feature freeze (August 12th). This is that list:

â Upgrade from FTS-3 to FTS-4:
  We will look into the work involved here, potentially this could be
  a large speed increase during indexing at times.

â Journal fixes:
  We want to improve this so we don't delete the DB when journalling
  is disabled and an ontology change is not supported.

â Ontology-agnostic triplets:
  The idea here is to allow 3rd party applications the ability to play
  with their own ontologies more easily.

  We realise we don't have time for this.

â ThunderBird support (>= v5):
â FireFox support:
  Both of these are courtesy of Adrien Bustany and I have tested them
  recently and work quite well. The should just need adding to the
  source tree.

â Needle tag searching/adding/removing:
  There is already a branch that does the searching here, the adding
  and removing just needs implementing and should be fairly quick to do.
  The current branch doing this is: tracker-needle-improved-tagging

â Writeback improvements:
  https://projects.maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=270735
  This involves moving some code into tracker-miner-fs and avoiding
  and deprecating the IgnoreNextUpdate signal. This is mostly done and
  ready to merge to master any day now.
  The current branch doing this is: writeback-refactor-rebase

â Add RDF type information to GraphUpdated signal:
  https://projects.maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=211816.
  This will be investigated.

â Deleting orphaned resources?
  This is not straight forward to do and we decided though we want to
  do it, we just don't have time. This is useful in cases where (for
  example, you have artists in the database for music that no longer
  exists. What's hard about this is knowing what can be cleaned up).

â Add Telepathy Logger miner to source tree.
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39448
  This will report events about contacts and messages to Tracker.

â UPnP mediaserver miner:
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/tracker-list/2011-March/msg00025.html
  Final review and addition of this to the source tree is needed.

â GUPnP DLNA as default generic media extractor:
  This means we will extract dlna profiles about files too. This is
  really just the current GStreamer extractor + some more SPARQL
  properties.
  The current branch doing this is: gstreamer-with-dlna

â Drop Helix media extractor:
  This is no longer used as far as we can tell. If anyone feels
  differently, please let us know.

--

There are some other changes which are coming up which are more minor 
and just bug fixes in most cases (some may already be in master or 
released in 0.10.x), they include:

â NB#270774 - single transactions for batch updates and only drop back
              to current solution on error
â NB#266579 - error-handling branch
â NB#246131 - custom-dlna branch
â NB#259780 - wip/miner-priority-queues
â NB#270977 - A method to delete during an insert or update
â NB#271745 - SPARQL 1.1 updates where appropriate:
  â SPARQL 1.1 Query
    â Switch to (expression AS ?var) syntax for select expressions
    â Add support for HAVING
  â SPARQL 1.1 Update
    â Require semicolons to separate multiple operations in a single
      update request
    â Drop support for INSERT INTO and DELETE FROM (replaced by WITH)
    â Add support for USING NAMED <uri> WHERE {...}
    â Support combined DELETE/INSERT with shared WHERE
    â Support short form DELETE WHERE {...}
â NB#271747 - Support for xsd:date
â NB#271764 - threaded-extractor branch
â NB#271754 - Manage the list of ignored files/directories/patterns 
directly at tracker-monitor level in libtracker-miner
â NB#269931 - Ignore keywords containing invalid UTF-8
â Extraction-improvements branch (threading model improvements)

--

What's next?

We will be rolling some 0.11.x releases with some of the larger complete 
features and things that are already done and start doing 0.12.x 
releases around the feature freeze date.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.