Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="Jamie McCracken"> > >>> Jamie, can you please explain what exactly Tracker is and does? I have >>> no idea what ‘first class object database’ means, so please explain what >>> you mean by that if you need to. >> http://live.gnome.org/ResearchAndDevelopment/Tracker > > Jamie, > > You're proposing the addition of an entirely new technology to GNOME, with > the intention that at some stage it could enter the Platform and be used by > many (if not almost all) applications. You need to be clear, succinct, and > explain *what* it is, what it *does* and *why* it is important.
As this stage I am simply proposing tracker-search-tool as a replacement for the gnome-search-tool as I believe it does a better job with faster instant search and search snippets. The other stuff is mainly my future plans and I already have interest from Epiphany (for their cool new bookmarks/history stuff - see the bottom of http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/BookmarksHistoryIntegration) and Rhythmbox for their common music database and will be implementing something for them in due course. I am of the impression that it will only becomes part of the platform if the above integration takes place and respective maintainers approve all this but yes it would be good idea to improve the communication to make that easier :) > > Think elevator pitch and use cases, rather than essay and hypotheticals. > > During this discussion, you've pitched Tracker as an indexer competitive > with Beagle, then as a "first class object database" possibly in line with > the old Storage ideas, then suggested that the indexer was secondary to the > "first class object database". This doesn't really raise confidence in your > ability to define the problem space, let alone solve the problem. > > Great technology loses out to poor communication (be it directly social or > "marketing") all the time. If you want to ensure your technology doesn't > fall into a coma of irrelevance, you *need* to step up and communicate it > well. yes thats *great* advice! I will start out by mentioning why I wrote Tracker. The main reason was I didn't like the way GNOME uses loads of different, inefficient and incompatible means of storing information (think Berkeley DB for EDS, MBox for emails, the zillions of small performance draining XML files used for bookmarks, history, rhythmbox's music database and many other things). So, I wanted to bring together all this stuff under one centralised database and in doing so increase performance, power and memory efficiency of the platform as a whole. There are two ways to do this - either by externally indexing this content, duplicating the data and acting as a high speed cache or by providing the actual storage for it. Tracker provides for both of these but the latter is preferable for efficiency reasons. With a centralised DB, it is easy to index, make metadata extensible, apply tags and contextual linking to all this data and make tracker a high level data hub for accessing all this information from one source. I also wanted files to be indexed so we could create flat views of data so we could say "show me all files of a certain mime type or a certain service" like all music files because I currently find the existing file dialogs inefficient to work with their pokey little windows and painful hierarchical views - we need more intelligence so when opening an office document it can show you all office documents on your system instead of only in a path Common db storage is also one way to sort out the mess of EDS, GAIM (and possibly telepathy?) all using different means to identify a "person". So tracker is basically a key part of creating a really well integrated desktop with lots of potential to make GNOME a more intelligent and productive environment for its users. I am sure there are many future possibilities for this too but for now Tracker is learning to walk first before trying to run and hence my decision to ease it in now with the much needed search technology that GNOME needs to compete with Vista and OS/X. It would be fantastic for Gnome 2.18 to have this around the time Vista ships and with a common dbus interface for indexing, Beagle too can benefit by effectively being in too for those that want more indexing than tracker currently provides (I dont plan on indexing as much as Beagle or maybe Strigi so there is bound to be room for them too). -- Mr Jamie McCracken http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/ _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
