GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 774967
Consider changing tracker search directories to a blacklist, not a whitelist
Last modified: 2021-05-26 22:24:23 UTC
I'm using Fedora 25 and GNOME 3.22, with tracker 1.10.1. I keep most of my files in SpiderOak, which creates a folder at $HOME/SpiderOak\ Hive. I noticed that none of my files seemed to be showing up in Dash's tracker-based desktop search (which is awesome) and did some spelunking, eventually discovering through dconf-editor that tracker only indexes a hardcoded list of folders in $HOME (org/freedesktop/tracker/miner/files)index-recursive-directories), and obviously the SpiderOak Hive folder isn't one of them. This was easy to resolve once I knew the reason, but it seem like an inappropriate default setting; people are liable to make all sorts of folders in $HOME (e.g. Books, Desktop, Podcasts), and none of them are going to be indexed weithout manual user intervention, leading to a lot of confusion. A superior alternative would be to set up tracker with a blacklist, not a whitelist. Perhaps recursively index $HOME but blacklist all hidden directories. That way users can create new folders in $HOME and have them indexed as expected.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new enhancement request ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.