Re: [Tracker] The Utopian idea, Tracker as it should be

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 22/09/14 12:21, Vishesh Handa wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com
> <mailto:martyn lanedo com>> wrote:
>
>     In terms of indexing content, we do this mainly to provide
>     "snippets" and to find content within files on the machine. This is
>     really quite important when people are searching they expect this.
>     In my experience, people are really not good at naming files well
>     and that means you can't rely on just file names and directories for
>     finding content by a keyword.
>
>
> We currently do not support snippets. The overhead of storing the entire
> plain text seemed too much. There have been some ideas about using the
> positional information of the word index to reconstruct a snippet.
> However, this is not ideal as we do loose all text formatting.

IIRC we store coordinates and the word in a table.
We also store the content in another table I believe. But we limit how 
much to a certain size to avoid DB bloat.

>         small amount of information that we need to store - user tags and
>         ratings are stored in the xattr of the files.
>
>
>     For xattr and tags, this is actually one of Tracker's weaknesses
>     IMO. I was approached by a student (IIRC) asking about this in
>     Tracker not long ago and they said they could have some time to
>     build support into Tracker. I would like this and it would really
>     fill the problem we have right now of persistent data for user tagging.
>
>
> If you do land up implementing this. Perhaps we should use the same
> xattr keys? I've tried following this [1] for comments, and for tags
> we're using "user.xdg.tags".

Absolutely, I want something that's "more" than Tracker for tags, e.g. 
like the XMP spec is "more" than for just JPGs.

> [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/
> [2] http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/

Thanks for the links here. I was looking at the WIKI Page, one concern I 
have is about cross-platform and cross-filesystem capability, I know we 
have some users on interesting set ups and I would prefer not to 
alienate them from features like this.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder & Director @ Lanedo GmbH.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/martynrussell