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Bug 631955 - drop status icon use
drop status icon use
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: tracker
Classification: Core
Component: General
git master
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: tracker-general
Jamie McCracken
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2010-10-12 08:55 UTC by William Jon McCann
Modified: 2011-02-02 15:14 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description William Jon McCann 2010-10-12 08:55:32 UTC
In GNOME 3 we won't really be supporting status icons.  Basically, current users of the API should migrate to using libnotify or become GNOME 3 System Status indicators.  However, I don't think tracker really fits either of those very well.  From looking at the code it seems like the status icon is used to deliver messages to the user about how the engine is indexing their data.  I'm not sure this is something that most people are particularly interested in.  I propose that we just drop the status icon by default.

Is there a use case for this that I'm missing?

Some more info here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/MessageTray/Compatibility
Comment 1 Martyn Russell 2010-10-12 09:24:48 UTC
It's about delivering status AND controlling the miners. In some cases, the miners need authentication too, this is a potential area for that to happen (it also occurs in the preferences in a branch somewhere else right now which Adrien Bustany is maintaining).

The status information is useful in certain situations, i.e. if we can't index for lack of disk space, or if application X decides to pause a miner, etc, etc.
Comment 2 Owen Taylor 2010-10-12 19:31:47 UTC
Hmm:

- What do you mean by a miner wanting authentication? I can think of a couple of possible examples:

  "Please enter the password for encrypted document <X> 
  so its contents can be indexed for search?" (You don't want to index encrypted document contents, do you??)

  "Please enter your Google password so your Google documents can be indexed for search"

 This is, in general, a pretty hard interaction to explain to the user, and I think in the second case really needs to be handled with a general framework for providing desktop access to online accounts, not something search specific.

 But leaving that aside, these are the types of interactions we want to handle with the message tray - the user has to do something, but they don't need to do it immediately. I don't see a reason why a status icon would be involved..

- Control is an advanced user thing. It must not be the case that I need to pause Tracker indexing to get Totem to play movies smoothly, because 90%+ of users won't do it.

- The indexer running out of disk space (the system running out of disk space!), is something that the user should be informed of via the general notification system, not a cryptic icon on there panel. (Any 16x16 icon is cryptic)

- Application X pausing the miner doesn't see to be relevant information to the user.

I definitely don't see a role of a status icon as something that's always there to provide shortcut control access to Tracker - the machinery behind search can't be something that takes up enough of a user's attention to warrant permanent parts of the UI.

There may be a "tracker geek" desire for a control shortcut or permanent pixels. We don't really have a real story for this type of thing within GNOME Shell at the moment, other than hand-waving around extensions. But I think that has to be separated from the experience for a normal user who just expects the search feature to work and doesn't think much about what is under the hood.
Comment 3 William Jon McCann 2010-10-12 19:43:30 UTC
Sounds about right to me.  I'll add that running out of disk space is a problem not exclusive to tracker.  We wouldn't want every subsystem reporting this separately.  So, we'll need to handle it system/session wide.
Comment 4 Martyn Russell 2010-10-13 01:42:57 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Hmm:
> 
> - What do you mean by a miner wanting authentication? I can think of a couple
> of possible examples:

For example, you start your computer and you need to re-authenticate with the facebook website to make sure the miner can operate. This is a limited case though, most miners don't need user interaction.
 
>   "Please enter the password for encrypted document <X> 
>   so its contents can be indexed for search?" (You don't want to index
> encrypted document contents, do you??)

This is not a current use case no.
 
>   "Please enter your Google password so your Google documents can be indexed
> for search"

This sort of example is more what I was thinking yes :)
 
>  This is, in general, a pretty hard interaction to explain to the user, and I
> think in the second case really needs to be handled with a general framework
> for providing desktop access to online accounts, not something search specific.

We do have a framework in place, but there is a limited UI which is not in the Tracker source tree right now. As said above with the facebook case, configuring this sort of thing is miner specific and seldom necessary.
 
>  But leaving that aside, these are the types of interactions we want to handle
> with the message tray - the user has to do something, but they don't need to do
> it immediately. I don't see a reason why a status icon would be involved..
> 
> - Control is an advanced user thing. It must not be the case that I need to
> pause Tracker indexing to get Totem to play movies smoothly, because 90%+ of
> users won't do it.

I agree. This is a legacy feature I will admit, I never pause miners on my machine.
 
> - The indexer running out of disk space (the system running out of disk
> space!), is something that the user should be informed of via the general
> notification system, not a cryptic icon on there panel. (Any 16x16 icon is
> cryptic)

Totally agree. Is there already such a system in place? 
 
> - Application X pausing the miner doesn't see to be relevant information to the
> user.

Currently it isn't.
 
> I definitely don't see a role of a status icon as something that's always there
> to provide shortcut control access to Tracker - the machinery behind search
> can't be something that takes up enough of a user's attention to warrant
> permanent parts of the UI.

The tracker-store status is also something we may want to be reporting. The only status the store reports is when it is replaying a journal after a possible database corruption. The case is unlikely and can burn up a lot of i/o. It is probably not worth keeping the status-icon app for that.
 
> There may be a "tracker geek" desire for a control shortcut or permanent
> pixels. We don't really have a real story for this type of thing within GNOME
> Shell at the moment, other than hand-waving around extensions. But I think that
> has to be separated from the experience for a normal user who just expects the
> search feature to work and doesn't think much about what is under the hood.

The "status" reporting part can be quite useful, but in reality, the user shouldn't ever need to care about these things and it generally only informative when doing an initial index (which for a non-tracker-developer should be almost never).

So I agree ;)
Comment 5 William Jon McCann 2010-10-27 18:02:17 UTC
Cool.  Want a patch for it?
Comment 6 Martyn Russell 2010-10-27 21:25:09 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> Cool.  Want a patch for it?

Thanks for offering, but we should be OK. There is some internal team debate about keeping it in the repository for developer use (similar to tracker-explorer and other utilities) but updating it to whatever gnome-shell offers here (I confess, I still need to look into this). If it is kept, it would be disabled by default I would imagine.

Either way if it gets removed it will be trivial to do, but thanks anyway ;)
Comment 7 Martyn Russell 2010-12-08 10:28:41 UTC
Setting version to "trunk" from "unspecified", sorry for the spam.
Comment 8 Matthias Clasen 2011-01-27 20:17:58 UTC
Will we get this turned off by default for gnome 3.0 ?
Comment 9 Martyn Russell 2011-02-02 15:14:14 UTC
commit 0f2789b39131a2a90b7459706b5b10ca131a0c39
Author: Martyn Russell <martyn@lanedo.com>
Date:   Wed Feb 2 15:12:36 2011 +0000

    tracker-status-icon: Remove this application, it is a geek's toy
    
    More reasoning can be found in the bug report.
    
    Fixes GB#631955, drop status icon use

This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.

(In reply to comment #8)
> Will we get this turned off by default for gnome 3.0 ?

Yep ;)