Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

I know that Thunderbird and firefox are moving to sqlite for storage but 
Im not sure in thunderbird's case whether emails will be stored in 
sqlite or just the config/mork stuff.

In another instance, BeOs tracker stored emails in a DB but made them 
accessible as individual files (one file per email)

One thing going for using sqlite for emails is that it should help 
eliminate the memory issues that evo currently suffers from as you will 
be using btrees with an effective cursor (sqlite supports the offset and 
limit settings for queries so you can page results in chunks)

MBox is admittedly still useful for data interchange so tracker would 
need to provide import/export capability here if it were to replace them.


> And then consider whether you indeed want to put everything under the
> same database.
>
> Global indexers: good.  We need that.
>
> Global metadata: good.  Does anyone but me miss the reliable, fast, and
> simple metadata storage that we used in GNOME 1.2?
>
> A database to put everything because databases can store EVERYTHING:
> bad.

Well tracker is very clear here - we will be defining storage for a set 
of fixed well defined first class objects (as depicted on trackers web 
page) rather than a system for storing any old junk.

One benefit of using predefined stuff is I intend to have a separate 
dbus interface for each first class object which defines the various 
applicable methods that can be actioned on them. At the moment we have a 
generic Files interface with various methods for getting info about a 
file, getting all files by mime or service type etc. I am also putting 
together a Music interface to be used by Rhythmbox as a common music 
database so Im confident tracker can provide a nice and usable system 
here as it will be more similiar to Beos tracker than WinFS.

I also think its a good idea to make storage optional so you should be 
able to configure tracker's sqlite db  to be either a cache db or the 
primary storage  so whether you want your emails in mbox files or not it 
wont make a difference to the functionality tracker offers.


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