When

• Date: Saturday 2nd May 2020
• When: 15.00 UTC

• Where: https://meeten.statt-drosseln.de/b/sam-nae-jep

Agenda

• Alpha release
• App porting
  • Nautilus - how to store the 'starred file' tags
  • Tags usage: per app vs global
  • Is it possible to test Tracker 3 with flatpak?

• ELI5 DataObject/InformationElement split

• Global extraction time limit - from https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/-/issues/107

• ... your item here!

Present

• SamThursfield

• CarlosGarnacho

• JeanFelder

• MarinusSchraal

Notes

• Alpha release
  • Carlos will do one now!
  • Add to gnome-build-meta repo for flatpak apps to use
  • Encourage distributors to package it in ppa, copr, etc.
• App porting
  • Nautilus starred tags

    • Some issues with this feature (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/243), but there's no clear plan to replacing the Tracker implementation.

    • The main issue is that not all files can be starred, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/-/issues/106 might help here.

  • Writeback
    • Broken in master.
    • Music uses this feature and has issues - it's hard to update the musicAlbum property right now, for example
    • Garnacho proposes a simple approach: apps trigger Writeback explicitly
      • Would writeback be a session daemon that apps talk to via a portal, or a library that apps use from inside the Flatpak sandbox?
      • We need to think how this interacts with Flatpak permissions, apps have read-only access to Music dir by default
        • Maybe we do want a permissions dialog to pop up if an app tries to write to the filesystem. We would certainly want to be able to allow many writes with one click.
  • Tags:

    • we'll keep tracker tag writing to miner-fs database for 3.0.

  • How can app developers test Tracker 3?
    • 3.0 is parallel installable with 2.0, you can build it with jhbuild and run it on the host by manually starting the miner-fs and extractor processes from /opt/jhbuild
    • If/when distros set up PPA/COPR repos or package tracker in unstable streams, you can simply install those packages to test
    • In the app's Flatpak manifest, you will need to manually allow access to org.freedesktop.Tracker3*
    • In the 'portal' branch there's an example Flatpak manifest too

    • Wiki page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker/Tracker3

* DataObject/InformationElement split

• Apps will need to be more careful in queries, for example fileSize is a property of DataObject and not InformationElement

• Use of nie:isStoredAs and nie:isInterpretedAs will resolve most cases

• This work is done, but some further work could be done before 3.0 -- see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/-/issues/103

* Global extraction time limit

• - We had one, it was lost with tracker-extract moving to be a TrackerDecorator - We should add it back.

Next meeting

../20200516