[Bug 1666676] Re: Install tracker by default

[Carlos Garnacho]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 5:58 PM, Khurshid Alam
<khurshid.alam at linuxmail.org> wrote:
> @Carlos Garnacho
>
> I have tested this on a low-end laptops first with no tracker and then
> with tracker installed with default configuration (and there our problem
> lies.) The default configuration is just unacceptable.

https://developer.gnome.org/gio/unstable/GSettings.html#id-1.4.19.2.9.25

>
> 1. Why does tracker index bzr, vendor, pycache folders by default? I put

Because nobody provided patches. I will welcome yours at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=tracker

What are 'vendor' folders at all?

> my git projects inside documents. You can literally see that with
> tracker daemon -f. Also, It should ignore any directory starting with
> "." by default

It does ignore hidden files/folders, both unix and msdos style on vfat
mounts

>
> 2. There are many other configuration available in Gsettings which
> aren't exposed in GUI.

As far as Tracker is concerned, UI is part of the integrator. The
tracker-preferences executable is a relic and will be eventually
discontinued.

>
> 3. I configure following things:
>     -- enable-writeback false
>     -- index-optical-discs false
>     -- index-on-battery false
>     -- index-removable-devices false
>     -- ignored-directories ['core-dumps', 'CVS', 'lost+found', 'po', 'vendor', '.git']
>     -- ignore-stop-words true
>     -- ignore-numbers true
>     -- max-words-to-index 1000
>     -- removable-days-threshold 3 ? (I don't not understand this)

- You seem to reset a bunch of those settings to their default:
index-optical-discs, index-removable-devices, ignore-stop-words,
ignore-numbers and removable-days-threshold
- You added 'vendor' to ignored-directories, good. Adding '.git' is
both useless and needless though, the hidden directory will be ignored
by default anyway, what you want (and the default) is having '.git' on
ignored-directories-with-content, so the parent directory is ignored
(and thus the whole cloned repo).
- The remaining settings (enable-writeback, index-on-battery,
max-words-to-index), how did you measure the impact of these
modifications? Did you reindex from scratch after every modification?
What were you aiming to measure, system responsivity, indexing
responsitivity, cpu usage, ... ?

>
> After this the system is somewhat working well. There are no aggressive
> indexing. All files can still be searched from shell. Documents, Bijiben
> etc works without any problems.

Perhaps you've just left initial indexing to happen? Tracker is
obviously smart enough to avoid reindexing stuff for the sake of it,
after initial indexing happened it will sit idle most of the time
unless there's file monitor events to attend to. Also, checking an
unmodified, up-to-date directory tree (as it usually happens on miner
startup) is orders of magnitude faster than indexing it from scratch.

>
> There are many options which can be disabled during compilation. For
> example extractor metadata for ps.gz, gif, iso, xps, abw seems pretty
> useless to me (who use it and why?). These can be disabled during
> compilation.

I have the feeling here and other places above that you are
extrapolating personal usecases to entire user bases. Not indexing
.iso files will eg. limit functionality of gnome-boxes. As for the
other document/image formats, how can you tell at all they are
useless? Would you think it's fair not to index the content of these
documents for users that actually possess those?

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to ubuntu-meta in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1666676

Title:
  Install tracker by default

Status in nautilus package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in ubuntu-meta package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  For Nautilus' built-in search to not be very slow, Nautilus needs to
  use tracker for search.

  This is especially important since it's being seriously proposed for
  Ubuntu 17.10 that we drop the "type-ahead search" patch that reverted
  the removal of that feature by Nautilus years ago. (LP: #1666681)

  To not cripple Ubuntu GNOME, it was previously decided to let Nautilus
  build against tracker but not use that functionality on Unity. See
  this patch:

  https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-
  desktop/nautilus/ubuntu/view/head:/debian/patches/ubuntu_tracker_only_on_GNOME.patch

  This bug is requesting that patch be dropped and the extra tracker
  components be allowed into main and installed by default in Unity.

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