Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 13:05 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:

> The response was positive. So I would like to propose Tracker as a new 
> GNOME module.

though I've seen the amount of work that has been done on it, I admit
I'm still ambivalent on Tracker, and the fact that nobody has come clear
with the scope of the project yet. we keep hearing stuff like "Tracker
will host all metadata about everything, ever" but since I have
objections to that I'd rather have somebody to give a balanced overview
of what Tracker is and why applications should use it.

the fact that Tracker hasn't ever gone through the external dependencies
list is also what worries me: are we proposing a module that it's just
not being used by anything in the platform?

> Right now Tracker 0.7 is currently in development and we are hoping to 
> get the 0.7. unstable release out the door in the coming month or so.
> 
> Right now we are considering making the miners (the file system crawling 
> at this point) optional so it acts purely as a store if needed by ISVs. 
> This is not yet done in master but can be if that's a GNOME requirement.

if Tracker is proposed as a metadata extractor, is there a library or an
API that allows applications to access the metadata, or am I expected to
use raw D-Bus calls?

if Tracker is proposed as a metadata storage then are there applications
that are part of the platform that are using it?

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi