The official announcement can be seen here.

Thank you to everyone involved!

Recently I also updated the GtkSearchEngineTracker implementation to not use hacky dlopen() calls and to use DBus instead. This avoids us updating the work for each new version of Tracker that comes along too. The patch attached to the bug (658272) should be applied soon (given Matthias was pushing for this sooner rather than later). So, we’re all on track!

The patch for this is awaiting approval from Bastien, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639928.

A demonstration of the plugin:

For now, I have dropped support for all older versions of Tracker because it really is a mess to maintain and GTK+ 3.0 should really be using the latest and greatest APIs anyway. The other change I made was to support searching by filenames not the content of files. There is a #define in the .c file (FTS_MATCHING) which allows switching between using FTS (Full Text Search) and filenames (which are usually part of an FTS search anyway). For me, finding a file based on the name itself seems more intuitive for the GtkFileChooser and tends to yield results I am really looking for better than the FTS matching. In most cases, I don’t want to find a file based on some content when choosing a file. I would appreciate any comments on this.

A demonstration of the new functionality:

What’s changed
Well, a number of small changes have been going on based on user requests and making sure all the tracker-search-tool old features are covered. Specifically:

• History is saved using a nice new editable combo box
• Tags can now be seen (though that’s about it for now, more work is needed here)
• A progress spinner has been added when queries take longer than the user might expect
• Support for Emails has been added

You can see all these new features in the latest video:

What’s next?
I would love to get tags working better, allowing adding/removing and searching by them. Generally, searching by tags isn’t hard, what is hard is making the search categories include tags and identifying them with files. It can be done, but doing it in a fast way is not quite so trivial. I already have a patch I am working on for this.

Using tracker-sparql
Recently I added support to list classes which we notify of changes in the database. This is generally quite useful and a common question on IRC:

$ tracker-sparql --list-notifies
Notifies: 23
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/08/15/nao#Tag
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nco#Contact
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nco#IMAccount
  ...

Similarly, I often found myself checking patches and the ontologies used in those patches, so I added a command line switch to search the ontology and to make this generally easier for developers and maintainers:

$ tracker-sparql --search text
Classes: 4
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo#TextDocument
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo#PlainTextDocument
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo#PaginatedTextDocument
  http://www.tracker-project.org/temp/nmm#SynchronizedText
Properties: 5
  http://www.tracker-project.org/ontologies/tracker#fulltextIndexed
  http://www.tracker-project.org/ontologies/tracker#fulltextNoLimit
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/01/19/nie#plainTextContent
  http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nmo#plainTextMessageContent
  http://www.tracker-project.org/temp/scal#textLocation

Using tracker-search
The tracker-search command is really one of the most powerful commands we ship in Tracker. It doesn’t do any more than tracker-sparql, in fact, it uses the same API as tracker-sparql does through libtracker-client. It is really just a convenience tool for those not wanting to have to type the same query into tracker-sparql all the time. You can search for videos, music, music artists, music albums, images, documents, files and folders. It also allows searching in all of those categories (if none are provided on the command line). Recently I fixed a bug which was reported because we returned results for media that was not mounted. So now we show only results which exist and have an –all option.

$ tracker-search --documents sliff
Files: 3
  file:///home/martyn/Tests/TrackerTestData/sloff.txt (urn:uuid:408d5272-26e2-d8f5-e2f3-f323fb9874bc)
  file:///home/martyn/Documents/Gobby/Discussion-Architecture (urn:uuid:58c29f03-4408-1ca4-d909-c02a6a81810d)
  file:///home/martyn/Documents/Reports/bar.txt (urn:uuid:dcc74bdb-a556-e2d6-d5ce-35ea3000a355)

Performance
There have been some seriously good performance increases recently and we have only just started looking into performance and bug fixing. Until recently, we have mostly been adding features.

Packages
People are eager to use Tracker and it is great to see Ubuntu PPA packages showing up. There are also RPMs from Debarshi Ray

Roadmap
So, the Roadmap is mostly done. Next week we will add a few final things internally and we should be about ready.

Today I managed to add a feature which uses the text under the mouse pointer to search with Google, Wikipedia and Youtube. Right now those are just hard coded, but I had in mind, to make it configurable.

Web Services

Andreas has been doing a great job chasing up some final issues on gtk.org, mainly with regards to the language bindings. Andreas has now removed all bindings that have no support for 2.6 and above and all bindings which are supported by GNOME are illustrated nicely too. So, if your language binding isn’t listed there and you know it is supported, please let us know on the gtk-devel list so we can rectify the pages!

I want to thank Andreas Nilsson for helping out with the design and Tim Janik for help with the final touches in getting the pages installed, not to mention everyone who commented.

I think people miss the point. People blog about what they want to blog about. It is the writer’s choice to write what they want as much as it is the reader’s choice to read what they want.

Feel free to ignore my blog

Lucas Rocha sent me a great patch for including the help manual translators to the release note generated.

Xavier Claessens is using the script for his Empathy releases and added support for getting the project website (and adding it to the release note) and making it possible to run the “install-module” script on master.gnome.org.

So thanks to both for their contributions!

I decided to add support for generating the email you send so all you have to do is literally click “Send”. It saves a lot of time and works quite nicely.

Try it out:
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/maintainer