Hi everyone, since I've just joined the mailing list, I'd like to say that tracker is a joy to use...when it works. ;-)
I have three observations I'd like to share in order to help make tracker better. #1 In spite of having used tracker for some time now, I've never been able to investigate why a certain (plain text) file was found in a seach and another isn't. It would go a long way in helping users understand the indexer's behaviour if there was some kind of log file which listed all of the files tracker intends to index, all of the files tracker attempted to index and the result of the attempt. As it stands, tracker has a couple of log files, but they don't seem useful. This is what they look like after a re-index (last night): $ ll ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker*log -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna 164719 2009-11-21 17:16 /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/trackerd.log -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna 0 2009-11-21 15:37 /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-extract.log -rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna 0 2009-11-21 16:05 /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-indexer.log -rw------- 1 tna tna 8446 2009-05-13 18:18 /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker.log t...@potjeh:~$ $ head ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker*log ==> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/trackerd.log <== 20 Nov 2009, 12:41:13: Tracker-Warning **: Error loading query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in shared-cache mode 20 Nov 2009, 12:41:13: Tracker-Warning **: Error loading query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in shared-cache mode 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed 20 Nov 2009, 13:36:35: GLib-GIO-Critical **: g_file_hash: assertion `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed ==> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-extract.log <== ==> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker-indexer.log <== ==> /home/tna/.local/share/tracker/tracker.log <== 13 May 2009, 09:36:54:805 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:39:59:090 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:41:52:989 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:41:53:020 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:41:53:031 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:42:02:750 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:42:02:921 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:42:03:056 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:42:03:060 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... 13 May 2009, 09:42:03:064 - Error - cannot end transaction. Rolling back... t...@potjeh:~$ The start of the files is representative of the rest of their content. #2 Loads, and I mean loads of my files are missing. Tracker told me it intends to index cca. 85000 files in my home directory, but the number of files I have is closer to...let's see: $ locate home | wc -l 440551 t...@potjeh:~$ I should point out that there are no users in /home other than myself. I understand that tracker supports a limited set of file types, but I don't see a reason for it to not at least index the full path to a file, including it's name, regardless of the type. I'm not sure how it's supposed to behave with files of an unknown type (because there's little visibility of what the indexer is doing), but the behaviour I see places tracker's coverage at just under 20% of the total number of files. Is it because of my disk usage (95% used, 11GB free)? I would definitely like to be able to answer questions like this by asking the tool or checking the logs. #3 It seems impossible to tell the indexer (via it's properties GUI) that it' should not index mounted disks without restarting the indexer. I would like not to restart the indexer and to store the preference for the next run, whenever it might happen. What I see in the preferences GUI is that if I decline to restart the indexer, the "index mounted disks" property is silently reset to "true". There are also problems when using find-as-you-type within the deskbar-applet, but I don't believe this is the place to discuss those (please correct me if I'm wrong). So, in summary, I would heartily welcome a lot more visibility of tracker's activities (at least in some kind of a debug mode), would like to understand why 80+% of my files aren't indexed, which ones they are and would appreciate a small bug fix in the indexer preferences dialogue. :-) I'm running Ubuntu, currently 9.04, on a Pentium M with 2GB RAM. I hope someone finds my report of some value and have no problem providing additional information and performing a test or two if it will help. Cheers, Tomislav _______________________________________________ tracker-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-list
