[ANNOUNCE] Tracker 0.0.2 "Ultra low Fat"

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

I hereby announce the second release of Tracker.

You can download a tarball from :

http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-0.0.2.tgz


INTRODUCTION

Tracker is a powerful metadata database and indexer framework that 
provides the ability to index, store, retrieve and search all types of 
file metadata including user defined ones. Tracker is super efficient 
with your systems memory when compared with some other competing 
frameworks, which offer less functionality too.

Tracker's features include:

* Very memory efficient and non-leaking (typical ram usage 3 - 6 MB). 
Unlike some other indexers, tracker is designed and built to run well on 
lower memory systems with typically 128MB or 256MB memory. It should 
even be efficient enough to use on some mobile devices.

* Non-bloated and written in C for maximum efficiency, portability and 
fast indexing of documents.

* Like any good daemon, tracker is pretty unobtrusive so no need to 
index stuff overnight. Tracker runs at nice+10 so it should have a 
minimal impact on your system.

* Integrated as a Nautilus search backend and as a Deskbar applet backend.

* Dbus based multi-threaded daemon makes bindings unnecessary (python 
and mono can use their native dbus interface to effortlessly interact 
with it)

* Implements the freedesktop specification for metadata 
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshared_2dfilemetadata_2dspec

* Extracts embedded File, Image, Document and Audio type metadata from 
files.

* Extracts embedded metadata from HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2 (DOC, XLS, PPT), 
OpenOffice (sxw), StarOffice (sdw), DVI, MAN, MP3 (ID3v1 and ID3v2), 
OGG, WAV, EXIV2, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, ELF, 
REAL, RIFF (AVI), MPEG, QT and ASF files

* Supports the WC3's RDF Query syntax for querying metadata

* Provides support for both free text search (like Beagle/Google) as 
well as structured searches using RDF Query

* Respond in real time to file system changes to keep its metadata 
database up to date and in synch

* Fully extendable with custom metadata - you can store, retrieve, 
register and search via RDF Query all your own custom metadata

* Can extract a file's contents as plain text and index them

* Provides text filters for PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice (all versions), 
HTML and PS files.

* Can provide thumbnailing on the fly


NEW FEATURES

* Full inotify support (only compatible with linux kernels 2.6.13 or higher)

* Fallback to FAM/GAMIN and manual polling for non-linux and/or 
non-inotify systems

* Imporved build system which allows you to specify which file 
monitoring backend to use

* Valgrind'ed to remove all leaks.



INSTALLATION (from source):

You will need to make sure you have the following dependencies installed :

libmysqld.a (version 4.1 or higher but not version 5) - this is the 
embedded mysql server library.

This can be found in Debian/Ubuntu package libmysqlclient14-dev.
RPMs (look for embedded server) can be found at : 
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.1.html
(NB tracker does not work with the client/server versions of mysql so 
you must have the correct *embedded server* package installed)

libdbus (0.50 +)

dbus-glib bndings (0.50 +)

glib (2.6+)

zlib

libvorbisfile3 (1.1+)

Recommended packages:

libextractor (0.5.9+) (tracker has a version inlined)
wv (1.0.2+)
poppler (pdftotext)



COMPILATION

To compile Tracker uses the following commands :

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

If you install using any other prefix then you might have problems with 
files not being installed correctly.

(You may need to copy the dbus service file to the correct directory 
and/or might need to update ldconf if you install into non standard 
directories.)


Compile Options

Tracker has several compiler options to enable/disable certain features. 
The following is available (all options should be passed as command line 
parameters to autogen.sh EG ./autogen.sh --disable-fam)

--disable-fam : this option omits support of FAM/GAMIN with tracker

--disable-inotify : this option omits support for inotify with tracker

--enable-libextractor  : this option forces the use of the prepackaged 
version of libextractor in tracker



RUNNING TRACKER


To run tracker, you need to manually start the tracker daemon trackerd. 
By default trackerd will index your entire home directory.

You can also pass a directory root to be indexed as a command line 
parameter if you dont want your entire home directory indexed. EG

"trackerd /home/jamie/Documents"

You can make sure that tracker only indexes a subset of your home 
directory and also specify folders not in your home directory by editing 
the tracker.cfg file in ~/.Tracker (which is created when you first run 
trackerd) and setting WatchDirectoryRoots to a semicolon delimited list 
of directories (full path required!)

EG:

WatchDirectoryRoots=directory1;directory2;directory3

On the first run, Tracker will automatically create a new database and 
start populating it with metadata by browsing through the user's home 
directory (or the root folder(s) specified).

On subsequent runs, Tracker will start up much much faster and will only 
ever incrementally index files (IE files that have changed since last 
index).

If installed correctly, the tracker daemon (trackerd) can also be 
started automatically via Dbus activation.


Tracker And Nautilus Search

Once you have installed Tracker and have some indexed contents, you 
should now compile Nautilus (ver 2.13.4 or higher) which should auto 
detect that tracker is installed and automatically compile in tracker 
support. You are now ready to appreciate a powerful and super efficient 
c based indexer in all its glory... happy hunting!

To make sure trackerd always start when you login to Gnome, you will 
need to add it to Gnome-session (select sessions from preferences menu, 
select startup program tab and then add /usr/bin/trackerd). For 
non-gnome installations, see the desktop docs for how to auto start an 
application for your particular desktop.

Tracker and Deskbar applet

Tracker is also integrated in gnome's deskbar applet. Please see that 
applet for more info.



COMMAND LINE TOOLS

Tracker comes with a number of command line apps that you can use:

"tracker-extract FILE" - this extracts embedded metadata from FILE and 
prints to stdout

"tracker-search SEARCHTERM" - this perfoms a google like search using 
SEARCHTERM to retrieve all matching files where SEARCHTERM appears in 
any searchable metadata

"tracker-query" - this reads from STDIN an RDF Query that specifies the 
search criteria for various fields. It prints to STDOUT all matching 
files. You can see some example queries in the RDF-Query-examples 
folder. You can run the examples as "tracker-query < RDFFILE"



--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/