GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 645326
Add Tracker based search providers
Last modified: 2016-12-22 16:28:46 UTC
The attached patches allow using Tracker when searching from the overview. The TrackerAsyncSearchProvider base class implements the core logic for querying and displaying results, and its subclasses run queries for various data types (documents, music etc.).
Created attachment 183862 [details] [review] Patch to make the thumbnailing code work even when items are not coming from GtkRecentInfo
Created attachment 183863 [details] [review] Patch to add Tracker search providers to the overview
Note, the above patches also need patch https://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=182302 applied first See http://blogs.gnome.org/abustany/2011/03/20/weekend-hack-gnome-shell-tracker-integration/ for the full story.
Created attachment 183864 [details] [review] Updated version of the patch that fails gracefully if Tracker is not available
Looks like the async search provider is close to being integrated (bug 655220) Then one could ship tracker search as an extension, like this https://github.com/philn/gnome-shell-grilo-search-extension
Review of attachment 183862 [details] [review]: See bug #588050 for the context of why we introduced get_recent_thumbnail. I'm not sure if any of the problems identified there are still relevant. Colin?
Colin: Can you answer comment 6, please?
I don't know what's going on in this bug. 1) Is there something already in the design that's not implemented? 2) How does using tracker here intersect with gnome-documents stuff? 2a) Actually, can we nuke the current doc search stuff from the shell and depend on gnome-documents? Is the idea here just that tracker is faster than GtkRecentInfo? I'm not actually sure what the story is for GtkRecentInfo <-> tracker bridging. (GtkRecentInfo definitely sucks...) See also https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649380
Errr catching up with this bug, the patch that Jasper is referring to in comment 6 was just a hack so that the thumbnails would work for all files, not just those from GtkRecent... I'm actually not sure how the Grilo extension does it there? André, are you asking Colin to comment on the availability of thumbnails for any resource or? Colin, this search provider uses Tracker as a general source, ie not just for recent items (so it's not that it's faster, it's more that if finds any document you have indexed).
(In reply to comment #9) > André, are you asking Colin to comment on the availability of thumbnails for > any resource or? Personally I ask nothing. I refered to the last word in comment 6, as I wrote before. I was just pinging.
In GNOME 3.4 we're working toward "Application Based Search" - see bug 663125 - where applications will offer search via a D-Bus service. The first application we're implementing this on (Florian has working patches), is GNOME Documents, which pulls it's results from tracker. It would be possible to use direct Tracker search for things where we don't have application based search in 3.4 - music, images - and exclude Documents, but Document search is really the one we need most, and that people will want most. So I think we should just wait until we have applications providing search for those categories and do without until then. So, unfortunately, we're not going to land this search provider. Thanks a lot for doing this work and I'm sorry we're not able to take advantage of it.
4 years later, we are still not at it, so it leads to discussions like this on the tracker mailing list : https://mail.gnome.org/archives/tracker-list/2016-December/msg00019.html Search file contents from activities is the natural way, as with the file name based search that is in place currently. It would make a Krunner or Spotlight equivalent for Gnome with little efforts, as the infrastructure is all there. The Documents application does not work for me. I don't want to open another application just to open a PDF or a specific document. On top of that, Documents has extension filters, so it ignores my text files and markdown notes, and a lot of other stuff. So, there is not practical alternative coming any time soon. Please, reopen this bug and make this feature come true.