Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 06/11/09 09:41, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 17:21 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> >    - 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.

Hej Alex,

Right now, we have a IndexSingleDirectories config option which could 
include $HOME and that's available already. Specifying depth is 
something we could do relatively easily, but we would need to add some 
work to make it configurable.

> >    - 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.

We have spent a lot of time over the past 6 months improving this. I 
would say 0.7 is streets ahead of what 0.6 used to be like in this 
regard. I think to some extent it depends on your data set but I don't 
notice tracker 0.7 working in the background on my home machine or 
laptop (other than the icon that updates of course) and I tend to have 
it watching my source directories while I work.

There might be more that we can do in this regard, but a lot of effort 
has been put in this area because on a device like the n900, you can't 
afford to hog CPU when on a phone call (for example).

--
Regards,
Martyn