zeitgeist team mailing list archive

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup@xxxxxxxxx>]

The reason that we are not using tools like Tracker and Beagle is that
we didn't find them "reasonable performance-wise", nor providing the
quality of results, or fine control of queries we wanted. And working
"reasonably well" is just not good enough in my book.

That said, there's nothing saying we must stick with ZG, it's just that
it is an easy practical solution.

My personal check list for an indexing tool is something like:

 a) Doesn't crawl you home dir on login (to install inotify watches or check for new stuff)
 b) High quality query relevancy ranking
 c) Able to sort by usage frequency or recency
 d) (wishlist: direct access to index api to inspect term stats etc without the need for DBus roundtrips)

Solving a) requires something like btrfs or fsnotify. To my knowledge
both Tracker and Beagle rely on inotify (possibly indirectly via GIO).
And Tracker fell short on b) + c) + d) last I checked. Solving b), c) ,
and d) seems to inevitably require something like Zeitgeist combined
with Xapian or Lucene (much like we do now :-)).

My currently preferred solution would be to:

 i) Extend ZG with a new range of data providers (music, u1, telepathy, contacts, etc)
 ii) Write a Nautilus extension that makes ZG index all files and folders you ever see in the file browser (this may require some filering logic in order not to spam your log too badly)

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Zeitgeist
Framework Team, which is subscribed to Zeitgeist Data-Sources.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/646724

Title:
  not all files show up in files-place

Status in Unity:
  Triaged
Status in Unity Files Place:
  Triaged
Status in Zeitgeist Framework:
  Fix Released
Status in Zeitgeist Data-Providers:
  Invalid
Status in “unity-place-files” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “zeitgeist” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  The Unity interface, with its files-place feature for user access to
  files/documents etc. is really great.

  However there is a problem since the search feature relies wholly on
  zeitgeist (AFAIK), in the zeitgeist is not tracking everything.

  E.g. in openoffice, I create a new file (or open an existing one) from
  within openoffice itself. This file does not show up, presumably
  because openoffice does not (yet) push its activity to zeitgeist.

  I guess any number of other programs could suffer the same problem.

  For the average user, this is surely going to be confusing. They will
  create documents via legitimate means ('New ...' buttons in their
  applications), and then expect to be able to search for them in the
  Unity files-place interface.

  To avoid this confusion I would guess there really needs to be a
  filesystem watcher on the home dir (or key folders within it) so that
  zeitgeist is aware of activity caused by non-zeitgeist-aware
  applications.