Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Joe Shaw wrote:
> Hi,

> > No these will be predfined initially like a Note will have a set of 
> > metadata associated with it which can be stored in the DB instead of 
> > as a seperate file (aka persistent storage). Anyway this all requires 
> > a relational DB to implement.
>
> My gut feeling here is that this sounds pretty limiting if this sort of 
> stuff is predefined.  What advantage does an application have in storing 
> this in Tracker over a DB itself (or even just XML in a file)?
>
> The use cases here seem very murky to me.

well taking the epihany bookmarks/history stuff into account, it would 
be very difficult to implement this without customization in tracker or 
any other general purpose solution (which is also why WInFS looks dodgy 
trying to be open ended via schemae).

Some first class objects will have special requirements and require a 
dedicated dbus interface to make it easy to use and as the first class 
objects are already definable its considerably easier to implement it 
this way.

Having an open ended system in tracker is not a big deal but it would 
only be suitable for much simpler objects (like Notes).


> > I take it you dont have a problem with tracker being used as a stand 
> > alone metadata DB in conjuction with beagle?
>
> I'm not sure, really.  I don't think it makes sense to run two different 
> services for this, and it's not clear to me that if these are separate 
> how developers are supposed to use them.  If the user wanted to get a 
> piece of metadata, would they use Beagle or Tracker APIs?  To search 
> these values, Beagle would have to also index them.  Does it make sense 
> to essentially store them twice?  My feeling lately is that these should 
> probably be the same thing.

fair enough

--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/