Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 17:21 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On 29/10/09 15:23, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:

> 
> I agree it needs fixing, but there are a number of things to consider here:
> 
>   - FANotify is being worked on by Red Hat and will be in the kernel for
>     us to use at some point - and we will adopt it then (I believe it
>     almost made it into the latest Fedora but didn't so should be in the
>     next release)
> 
>   - We changed the locations that are indexed by default from $HOME to
>     use XDG user dirs for documents, desktop, music, pictures and videos.
>     So the focus has changed slightly to the things you most likely want
>     indexed instead of EVERYTHING. Of course adding EVERYTHING into the
>     config doesn't escape the fact that inotify is limiting us.

This is kind of nice. Would it be possible to in addition to these
monitor $HOME non-recursively? Or maybe just one level down? That way
you would get most "typical" documents, but not descend into huge source
trees or whatnot.

>   - In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it is that important to
>     fix as Lennart says. I don't consider myself a normal user and I
>     don't even breach the inotify limit (I come close though with all the
>     project sources monitored). I personally would much rather have an
>     Tracker which is fast to query/update and has good coverage on the
>     metadata it extracts as a priority over supporting EXTREME use cases.

I think the inotify issue is only part of the problem. Whats needed is
generic work on Tracker and/or the kernel so that its possible to run it
while not affecting system performance as much. This kind of lowlevel
work is hard, but I see it as really important, because as soon as there
is any disturbance to general system performance when Tracker-indexer
runs a majority of people will remove it because they won't think its
indispensible (since they haven't even started using it much). This
leads to a Moment 22 thing where people not using it leads to
applications not supporting it and thus it not having interesting app
integration and thus leading to less users.