Beagle badness

[Jamie McCracken]

Evandro Fernandes Giovanini wrote:
> Em Sex, 2006-11-10 às 10:46 +0200, Johan Kiviniemi escreveu:
>> On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 08:18:04PM -0500, Samuel Cormier-Iijima wrote:
>>> There is a proposal to include Tracker by default:
>>> https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/tracker-integration
>>> I think this would fix most of the performance problems people are
>>> having
> 
> Currently, Tracker has advantages compared to Beagle, mainly smaller
> memory footprint. 

it also has a fixed capped deterministic memory usage so it wont eat all 
your resources over time and uses considerably less cpu and battery 
power to index stuff. It also sleeps without peridically waking up so is 
very friendly for notebooks

But Beagle also has its strong points, such as better
> integration with applications (Evolution, Firefox and Gaim for example),
> as well as much wider testing. It's been enabled by default in Fedora
> Core for two releases now, and it's also enabled by default in
> openSUSE / SLED.  

that does not mean its more stable though. Beagle has been in 
development for many years (4 years I think) and has been completely 
rewritten from scratch. It also uses technology that is still maturing 
(mono and mono lucene port) and is a lot more complex than Tracker which 
is designed to be KISS.

Tracker by contrast has been in development for a little over a year and 
mostly in my spare time (20 hours a week)

Yet tracker was built from the ground up to be stable, memory efficient 
and very robust and has been proposed for Gnome whilst Beagle devs still 
have big problems with stablity and memory usage and they admit 
themselves its no where near ready.

However the best way to prove tracker is more stable is to get George 
Farris to run it and see if it has any issues compared to Beagle.


> 
>> In addition to minimal resource usage, Meta Tracker has some very
>> appealing features over Beagle, such as RDF searches and very flexible
>> metadata storage (arbitrary tags or other metadata can be attached to
>> files).
>>
> 
> That could be cool, but it won't be of any use to Ubuntu until
> applications start supporting it. I think Rhythmbox is the most likely
> candidate.

yes thats right and any distro shipping RhythmBox by default will have 
to ship tracker by default too if the two becomes integrated.

Tracker also has much more support from Gnome devs with a greater 
willingness to integrate so its inevitable that tracker will become 
mandatory anyhow in Gnome sooner or later.

> 
>> The CVS version <https://launchpad.net/products/tracker/trunk> has
>> evolved nicely since the last release.
>>
> 
> The 0.5.1 release is quite recent. :)

its a stable release which should have no serious problems (feel free to 
prove otherwise)


On another note given that there is a 256MB RAM limit on feisty, I dont 
see how Beagle can be shipped by default at the moment whilst tracker is 
the only option if feisty wants to compete with Vista.


-- 
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/