Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 17:51 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 22:25 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> > But in previous GNOME release we accepted stuff like PolicyKit or
> > DeviceKit or PulseAudio while not yet officially released or widely
> > adopted. And those stuff was needed to be installed under /usr in order
> > to properly work.
> 
> I believe all of these things are (optional) dependencies, not anything
> part of the GNOME desktop proper. Except for maybe PulseAudio. Solaris,
> for example, don't use any of this stuff.
> 
> > Tracker, instead, can be simply tested in a JHbuild sandbox.
> > 
> > So this doesn't seem to me a reason to drop its inclusion.
> 
> I'm with Zeeshan on this - what's the harm of delaying the inclusion of
> Tracker until it has actually proven itself to be useful for Linux
> Desktop uses? (In my view, Maemo isn't a typical Linux Desktop)

its already useful (except for maybe geeks that dont want an indexer)


> 
> Not to sound like an asshole or anything but, I mean, didn't distros try
> including Tracker by default in previous releases? AFAIR, it didn't
> really work well. So if GNOME included Tracker in the next release and
> core parts of GNOME started depending on it in a way that couldn't be
> turned off... then distros would be in a lot of trouble if Tracker
> didn't work well. This would probably end up reflecting badly on the
> GNOME project.

this is all hypothetical. What matters is that people actually try it
out then make judgements based on whether the current tracker gives a
good experience. If people dont do this then the same arguments will be
made whenever tracker is proposed again regardless of how good or bad it
is


> 
> Instead, I'd be a lot more thrilled if the Tracker developers would
> suggest Tracker as an optional dependency (just like e.g. polkit is.. or
> at least used to be) - e.g. apps using Tracker would have need a
> --disable-tracker or --enable-tracker configure option. This way we can
> start integrating Tracker into GNOME without causing the ride to be too
> bumpy.

all the optional use cases are pretty much already done (nautilus, file
chooser, totem etc). The problem is that to leverage the full power of
tracker, you need much deeper integration and its not practical to make
it optional in those cases

The way I see it is if Gnome wants to be in a position to challenge OS/X
and Windows 7 then it needs to make bold decisions. Playing it safe
means it will stagnate and Gnome will miss out on all the cool
technology. 

jamie