Great news
Great news
Posted May 2, 2009 1:07 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333)In reply to: Great news by sbergman27
Parent article: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks
But Tomboy is fast enough.
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As far as Beagle vs Tracker... Tracker is faster, but it doesn't index or pull metadata as nearly as well, or support as many formats as Beagle does. Nor does it descend into compressed files (at least it didn't last time I used it) and a dozen or so other features that Beagle has had for a long time now.
If your comparing Tracker vs Beagle you might as well do in slocate vs Beagle for all the relevence of it. It's a Apples to Oranges comparison.
Tracker may reach the same level of sophistication that Beagle has offered for a long long time now, but it's not going to happen any time soon and it's probably going to end up relying on many other projects to do it's job.. which is fine. Either way it's going to require Tracker to bloat up quite a bit.
Posted May 2, 2009 2:22 UTC (Sat)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (12 responses)
You are going to need to support that claim with evidence. It was probably true in 2006. But over the last year or two?
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That was not even true in 2006, and I'm skeptical that you could be so poorly informed as to actually believe what you are saying.
Beagle was on course to be the standard indexing utility for Gnome. But Tracker has *long* replaced it in Ubuntu and Fedora, which together probably represent a majority of desktops, and likely in other distros, as well, with the notable exception of Suse/OpenSuse for obvious political reasons.
Ubuntu and Fedora both include Mono, so there is no extraneous political pressure for them to choose Tracker over Beagle. So far as I can see, the decisions were based upon relative *technical* merit.
This post from Rahul, dated 1.75 years ago, sheds a lot of light on the truth:
http://osdir.com/ml/linux.redhat.fedora.desktop/2007-08/m...
And yes, it *is* annoying the way Beagle silently goes into infinite loop la-la land, requiring a restart once you notice that its not indexing anymore, but sucking up 100% processor doing nothing, instead.
One last note. The Beagle guys kyped the core of their project from Apache by porting Apache Lucene from Java to C#! And even with that tremendous head start, both temporally and with regards to having Lucene handed them on a silver platter, and in addition to using such a "powerful" and "productive" platform as Mono, they *still* have been shown up by a few guys, with no corporate sponsor, who are good with C.
Posted May 2, 2009 3:37 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (11 responses)
It probably has more to do with the fact that tracker is less invasive and uses less resources, and was adopted by Gnome, then any sort of feature parity.
> You are going to need to support that claim with evidence. It was probably true in 2006. But over the last year or two?
Well then they probably need to update their webpage then.
Lets see... How is Trackers Gzip file support? Can it recursively descend into archives yet? Or how is that Kmail support comming along? I am sure that Tracker does a good job keeping track of your IRC logs. I like Tracker (and prefer it to Beagle), but that it doesn't have the same level of file support that Beagle does.
> they *still* have been shown up by a few guys, with no corporate sponsor, who are good with C.
You keep saying stuff like that. But I don't think that it was the Beagle project that had to spend pretty much the entire last year refactoring their code instead of improving support or getting releases out the door.
Oh, and getting paid to make _Free_ software kicks serious ass, so kudos to Novell for sponsoring projects and putting money into the Linux desktop.
> And yes, it *is* annoying the way Beagle silently goes into infinite loop la-la land, requiring a restart once you notice that its not indexing anymore, but sucking up 100% processor doing nothing, instead.
Last time I checked Tracker has bugs, too. In fact I am very familar with having to hide large files (say bigger then 500MB or so), bittorrent activity, and fuse-mounted file systems away from Tracker because it would choke and cause excessive drive activity and cpu usage.
And like I said comparing Tracker and Beagle is Apples to Oranges. They do 'search' and they are for 'the desktop', but they are taking different approaches.
Posted May 2, 2009 5:05 UTC (Sat)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (9 responses)
...
I like Tracker (and prefer it to Beagle), but...
Whatever feature differences there might be, they don't seem to be features that many (people, distros, DEs, you) care enough about enough to use Beagle instead of Tracker, and pay the penalty in resources that Beagle incurs. (Some would unkindly call that bloat.) Kmail indexing might be a good point. But don't most of those folks use Strigi, anyway?
Based upon usage, it appears that on the balance Tracker does, indeed, have the better product when the costs and benefits are all taken into account. Which is what really counts at the end of the day, no matter how well Beagle might make coffee. Especially if the coffee is $5 a cup.
Posted May 2, 2009 7:24 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (7 responses)
While Tracker and Beagle are both available in the repository and Beagle was installed by default several releases back, neither of them are the default at the moment in Fedora. Beagle was having a number of hard to debug memory leaks and Tracker was not mature enough yet. Tracker can still be proposed by default however and has a good chance of making it in now.
Fedora has removed Mono and Mono dependent apps like Tomboy and F-Spot from the Live CD due to lack of space so apps not using Mono just has a higher chance of being made defaults just considering the space constraints and without going into other Mono criticisms. The technical merits alone would be enough to decide one way or the other.
Drag - you are wrong about GNOME adopting Tracker. Neither Tracker nor Beagle is part of GNOME officially.
Posted May 2, 2009 16:37 UTC (Sat)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (5 responses)
So the app written in the managed environment was having tough to crack memory leak problems which were serious enough to cause its removal from default status, whereas the C++ app did not? That's certainly a little gem.
I stand corrected on the "Tracker is default in Fedora" issue. I had thought that it was installed by default in my last Fedora install, but that was well over a year ago and I could easily be remembering incorrectly. Tracker is, however, most definitely the default for Ubuntu.
Posted May 2, 2009 17:32 UTC (Sat)
by james_w (guest, #51167)
[Link] (2 responses)
Afraid not. Tracker is no longer present on new Ubuntu installations by
Posted May 2, 2009 18:10 UTC (Sat)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 2, 2009 20:50 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted May 2, 2009 21:07 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 6, 2009 1:45 UTC (Wed)
by shmget (guest, #58347)
[Link]
Yet they are widely claimed as such...
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Posted May 2, 2009 19:58 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
Oh. I thought that I read that they did. But I guess they'll have to pick something for Gnome 3.0-land. I am hoping that after the refactoring that they'd be able to get some impressive results...
Posted May 3, 2009 10:01 UTC (Sun)
by oever (guest, #987)
[Link]
Posted May 15, 2009 13:21 UTC (Fri)
by hozelda (guest, #19341)
[Link]
Don't pretend Csharp is magical and obviates the need for its users to refactor. As soon as you talk about a design decision above the language differences or existing api differences level, refactoring cannot be factored out.
In addition, C offers opportunities to cut fat out by refactoring in ways you might not be able to if you are limited to a high level API or should you use a language without enough resolution.
Great news
Tracker is faster, but it doesn't index or pull metadata as nearly as well, or support as many formats as Beagle does.
"""
If your comparing Tracker vs Beagle you might as well do in slocate vs Beagle for all the relevence of it.
"""
Great news
http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/
vs
http://beagle-project.org/Supported_Filetypes
Great news
It probably has more to do with the fact that tracker is less invasive and uses less resources, and was adopted by Gnome, then any sort of feature parity.
"""
Great news
Great news
Beagle was having a number of hard to debug memory leaks and Tracker was not mature enough yet.
"""
Great news
default.
Great news
Great news
Great news
Great news
A guy even wrote a book about how Garbage Collection was the best thing since slice bread, and even taking bet that eventually the Linux Kernel will be rewritten ... wait for it... in C#!!!!
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein.
Great news
Great news
We are talking with the Tracker people to use this Strigi functionality which available from the library libstreamanalyzer.
Refactoring