Cardapio

The state of local search

Registered by Thiago Teixeira

So, I just clean-installed Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and, obviously, the first thing I did was to install Cardapio -- as I a;ways feel digitally-crippled without it. So I guess this is me patting myself in the back, but more importantly also praising the ever-increasing Cadapio team and our amazing bug-hunting contributors. Yay to all of us :)

Anyway, the big downside of this whole transition is that it broke local file search for me. Tracker, as has been called to our attention before, is still at version 0.8.x which is incompatible with Cardapio for several reasons. However, now even the unstable branch (version 0.9.x) doesn't seem to cut the mustard anymore. I installed it on my machine but can't get Cardapio -- or even Tracker Search Tool -- to display any results. I'm sure I could tweak some configuration files and make it all work, but that defeats the purpose. Cardapio aims to be usable to everyone, even those who don't know how to manually edit config files, or do not want to.

Of course, this situation should come as no surprise. Tracker has been iffy / barely-usable for a while now, and I am starting to feel like it may take years before it gets to a mature state. This is a sad state of affairs.

Luckily, there is a solution in sight, and I wanted to see what people thought.

As you may already know, the KDE project has recently adopted a desktop search daemon called Strigi, which is platform-independent (does not require QT) and, by all accounts, fast and reliable. It is also readily available in Ubuntu's repositories. All of this makes me interested in writing a new file-search plugin, using Strigi as a backend rather than Tracker.

So, for this blueprint I would like to discuss:
1) Have you used Strigi before? What are your thoughts on it?
2) Have you developed for Strigi before? Where should one start? Would you like to help?
3) Is Strigi ready for the average Joe? That is, does it "just work" and is it easily-configurable?

Ok, enough talk on my part. Discuss!

Blueprint information

Status:
Complete
Approver:
None
Priority:
Undefined
Drafter:
None
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
None
Definition:
Obsolete
Series goal:
None
Implementation:
Unknown
Milestone target:
None
Completed by
Thiago Teixeira

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

[tvst 2010-10-10]

Pros and Cons:

CON: Looking at the Strigi project page (I think I have the right one, but who knows?) the last blog update was in 2008. That's a bad sign...
link: http://strigi.sourceforge.net

PRO: It does seem to "just work". For instance, after installing Strigi I was already able to search my system using Python:

>>> import dbus
>>> bus = dbus.SessionBus()
>>> obj = bus.get_object('vandenoever.strigi', '/search')
>>> strigi = dbus.Interface(obj, 'vandenoever.strigi')
>>> hits = strigi.getHits('test', 10, 0)
>>> for hit in hits: print hit[0]

(this code was taken from Deskbar's Strigi plugin -- which itself doesn't seem to work on my system)

CON: I can't seem to get Strigi to also show folders as search results

    ~

UPDATE: just found this article http://www.tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-desktop-search-tools . Interesting read.

Anyone know anything about Recoll? http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

------------------------
[tvst 2010-10-13]

CRISIS AVERTED!!! It turns out that Tracker 0.8.7 *does* work with our dbus-based plugin just fine. All I had to do was make a small change in the SPARQL query being used and it's working now.

Pushing to the trunk as I write this, and will update the PPA in a couple of hours.

------------------------
[jancborchardt 2010-10-13]
Wow! If I am not mistaken, the Tracker plugin now works out of the box on a normal install? – this is a major improvement and I guess that is worth enabling it by default as well as an update post or some spreading to the well-known news sites. :)

------------------------
[tvst 2010-10-13]

Yep. It works out of the box now.

But we can't enable it by default because Tracker is not installed by default in Maverick. So the plugin will fail to load and Cardapio will disable it. So in the end enabling it by default makes no real difference (unless you already have Tracker installed).

You are welcome to alert the internets about this development, by the way :) Just wait for the PPA to get updated first . It's currently in the Launchpad queue.

Oh, I should also clarify that a limitation of the Tracker 0.8.x branch makes the filename search be case-sensitive. This is solved in 0.9.x though.

UPDATE: actually the Tracker plugin was *already* active by default. You just didn't notice because you probably didn't have tracker installed :)

--------------------------------
[jancborchardt 2010-10-13]
No, I guess I was just confused. ;) Anyways, nice going.

(?)

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