Paolo Maggi wrote: > Hi Jamie, > >> I would like to propose this for inclusion into Gnome 2.18 as its now >> been well tested and should be stable enough. >> Tracker is being developed by a growing community of volunteers to >> create the best and most efficient desktop search, > > How is it related to beagle?
it only overlaps on the indexing front - everything else is different though as far as I can tell > Which are the pro and cons of using it as a desktop search solution with > respect to beagle or other existing solution (if any)? I cant comment too much on Beagle cause the last version I tried almost a year ago was unusable on my 256mb machine. I can highlight tracker's strengths though : 1) Low memory usage. If started with option --enable-low-memory we can peg memory usage to between 3-6MB. Without that option its typically twice that but with much faster indexing. 2) High speed indexing with the --turbo option 3) High speed search - average under 20ms + whole load of stuff that tracker can do that beagle cant (while it remains a dedicated indexer that is) -extensible metadata which can be mixed and match with full text search so you can easily search for everything with a full text search of "Penguin" against a tag "zoo". We do this effortlessly with our powerful rdf query support. You can even define indexable metadata that will show up in full text searches. > >> extensible >> metadata server and next generation first class object database all in >> 100% C code. > > This is nice. We really need a central metadata server in GNOME (many > apps are using in-house solutions to store metadata, see nautilus, > gedit, evince, etc.) > >> Tracker now comes with a new GUI tool - Tracker search tool which is >> based on the source of Gnome search tool and if accepted it should >> replace this. > > It seems beagle have a nice GUI for searching, would it be easy/possible > to copy/port this GUI using Tracker as backend (maybe implementing > libbeagle-like API on Tracker)? Not really as we are quite different. There are some things in common which should be abstracted though but because a lot of python stuff is using tracker via dbus we would ideally need beagle to implement a shared dbus interface which Im more than jappy to cooperate with (mono now has some good dbus bindings so this should be doable) Tracker can also be run as a standalone metadata database by passing the --disable-indexing option to it so if you want to use beagle you can without overlapping. A screenshot of tracker's initial GUI : http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-search-tool.png In future versions we will expose tags, extensible metadata and allow mixing of metadata and full text searches. > > Which are the data sources and file formats supported by Tracker? all the major files types and their metadata is supported (images, docs, music etc) > > Is it easy to extends Tracker to add support for new data sources and > file formats? Where can we find more info about how to extend Tracker? fairly - full text filters are simply shell scripts and metadata extractors can be easily added (to the tracker-extract program) -- Mr Jamie McCracken http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/ _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
