Hi guys! Passionate observers of the project have probably noticed that Jürg and me have started working on several new branches.
We started out with calling them architecture-something followed by branches called tracker-store-something. Right now we have tracker-store and tracker-store-queue. These branches are about a rearchitecture that we are working on. The rearchitecuture's main ideas are: 1) The daemon Transforming trackerd into tracker-store. This means that tracker-store wont have indexing nor monitoring code. It'll be your SPARQL update and query servant that knows about the Nepomuk ontologies. I like to refer to this as the separation of church and code: it removes all inotify from the SPARQL service and moves that to the indexer. This makes it for example more easy to replace the indexer, to have different kinds of metadata servicing processes. It also gives integrators the opportunity to have a SPARQL+Nepomuk store and query service without an indexer. 2) The indexer Transforming the indexer into a completely standalone entity. This means that the indexer will do the monitoring too. Right now the indexer doesn't do this file monitoring, trackerd does it. Among the ideas the guys want to split the indexer up into multiple components. Most of this work depends on finishing tracker-0.6 as it'll be mostly the same people who are now working on that branch who'll passionately do most of the work on the rearchitecture of the indexer. Their plans all sound very cool to me. 3) The extractor Making the communication between the big three (store, indexer and extractor) more efficient is also among the plans. Right now you can compare the communication with a bunch of roundtrips (in both directions) between all three processes. We are envisioning a better structure where the communication is more like a triangle. 1. The indexer will monitor and find work for the extractor to do 2. The extractor gets instructed to extract metadata and ... 3. It sends it to tracker-store, which stores it 4) Your project's metadata delivery component The new architecture is also for all those crazy ideas floating around in the community: Zeitgeist, GeoClue, etc. They'll be telling us about metadata "news": as soon as they know more about something, they'll just us. And we'll store it as Nepomuk and make it accessible over SPARQL. - Zeitgeist is a good example of this: its backend implements all sorts of funky algorithms for translating user behaviour into computable and meaningful metadata information. Like history of document usage. Linking up relevance based on what the user was focusing on while working with a specific document. I don't know (it all sounds crazy-cool to me, just do it guys!). - There's a GSoc for collecting your "online metadata". For example from Facebook, your favorite Youtube movies, etc. Cooool! And the student is a really clever guy I noticed. So this will eventually just work. You'll see! Awesome idea, I like this very much. x) Development methodology We plan to do this rearchitecture step by step. Taking small steps at the time. This means that you'll see certain crazy decisions being made within branches. Choices that might not always work well. It's of course not the idea that we'll also leave it that way. The idea is of those that we want to focus on a certain aspect of the architec- ture before we replace something else that we have put in place quickly to enable ourselves focusing. We will work as much as possible using branches. Each such branch can be considered, for our contributors, as such an area of focus. We plan to increase communication about the plans we have soon: We're still in a bit of experimental phase, but the overall idea has been solidifying lately. I think that with tracker-0.6 being prepped, and being almost finished, that sooner or later there's going to be more and more focus on the tracker-store branches. Here's a blog item that I wrote about these rearch plans earlier: http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/04/24/tracker-our-near-future-plans We hope that our community contributors will somehow find a way to join us in our efforts. We're trying really hard to keep you guys involved. But being a team of people, we're also working pretty fast nowadays. Huge ideas combined with a great team of developers equals huge changes. Understanding communication is key, I'll try to continue increasing it. Good, now back to your keyboards and start hacking! Cheers -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be _______________________________________________ tracker-list mailing list tracker-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-list
