zeitgeist team mailing list archive

[Neil Jagdish Patel <neil.patel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey,

Congratulations :)

I've got it built and running, however have nothing to test it with --
have the tests been ported over to the new API? They seem to fail with
broken D-Bus signatures. Also, are there any front-ends working with it
yet or is that effort beginning now (gnome-zeitgeist seems to have
stalled at the moment)?

Thanks,

-- Neil

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 15:18 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On behalf of the Zeitgeist team I am proud to announce our first
> development release, Zeitgeist 0.3.0, leading up to what will be our
> stable series which will be 0.4. It is our intent to aim for a 1.0
> release as soon as we feel good about the stable series, but that is
> still a bit in the future. Now that we've crossed the initial hurdle
> in the rewrite we expect the release cycle to be much shorter than
> this one, although we have not settled on something strict yet.
> 
> As many of you know the bulk work on this release was done in the
> Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolzano. Since we came back we been busy little
> bees polishing it up and fixing bugs - trying not to flame each others
> too much when discussing the designs :-) Working face to face in
> Bolzano gave us a unique chance to really discuss things through and
> get to the bottom of the details. This will also affect other
> developers a bit since...
> 
> We were bad boys and decided to change both our internal database
> structures as well as our public DBus API. Sorry - but after long
> discussions we all agreed that this was for the best. The new design
> is leaps and bounds better than the old one. This means that you both
> have to give up on your old log database, and accept that there are no
> GUI written for the new API just yet. This is being worked on as you
> read this though!
> 
> Something that might come as a shock to some other developers is that
> we decided not to store annotations and bookmarks within Zeitgeist.
> This should be done in Tracker or some other semantic metadata
> storage[1]. Zeitgeist answers only when and how data was accessed, but
> stores no information about the current state of the metadata. We will
> be working very closely with Tracker from now on since 0.7 is a
> blessed dependency for GNOME 2.30. Congrats to the Tracker Devs.
> 
> You can download the release from: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download
> 
> The NEWS entry reads:
> 
> First development release leading up to the stable 0.4 series. This
> release features:
> 
>  - Complete rework of engine and DBus API. Read: apps written against 0.2.*
>    will most certainly need an update (see fx.
>    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-November/msg00019.html)
>  - Public Python client API defined in zeitgeist.datamodel and
>    zeitgeist.client modules
>  - Documented public API with Sphinx (we'll have an URL for you shortly)
>  - Changed Ontology from XESAM to Nepomuk.
>  - Removed the Storm backend (obsoleted in 0.2.1).
>  - Removed the Querymancer backend.
>  - Support for event payloads (binary attachments to events)
>  - An extension API for the core engine, allowing extensions direct
> access to the DB
>    There are already a handful extensions things in the works here,
> you will hear
>    more about this later
> 
> There are a few DISCLAIMERS that needs to be attached to this:
> 
>  - The event notification/signals are not yet ready in the new DBus API.
>    We expect to have that ready for 0.3.1.
>  - We plan to support querying only for available items (eg. filtering out
>    deleted files, not listing files on detached USB storage, etc.). However this
>    feature is not fully supported yet, even though it is exposed in the API.
>  - While we are pretty satisfied with the database layout, there may still be
>    changes in the ontologies or concrete data extraction methods. This might
>    require that users delete their log databases in order to rebuild them
>    with the new definitions. Of course this will no longer happen when we
>    go stable
>  - Much related to the point above our event ontologies are not yet
> set in stone,
>    and minor changes are expected
>  - We have only one logger enabled for now. Namely the one monitoring your
>    recent files. In coming releases this logger may well be deprecated in favour
>    of application specific plugins.
>  - And finally. Please note that this is a *development release*. We can not
>    guarantee stability of services nor APIs, although we strive hard to keep
>    things stable.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Mikkel
> 
> 
> [1]: There have been talk about defining (and implementing) a very
> simple DBus API for storing semantic annotations (bookmarks, tags,
> comments, ratings, etc). In our internal speak such a service is
> called a Repository. Tracker or Soprano would expose this API in most
> cases, but on platforms where they are not available the simple
> Repository implementation would be most handy. This being said, it is
> currently not a high priority to implement a Repository, there are
> alternatives ready in Tracker and Soprano.
> 
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