Hey! I’ve finished the work that was necessary on Tracker to make it better able to serve Documents and other applications. I just need to get my patch reviewed and perform the necessary alterations.

By the way, It actually took me more time to get DBus working on JHbuild than tying the DBus method to the tracker-miner-fs‘ method which I wrote before. I bypassed it by following this old Murray’s blog post.

So, how useful is it?

To begin with, a typical scenario would be an application sitting on Tracker (such as Documents), which wants to tell the file-system-miner to index a given mount (by indexing, I mean crawling the mount point for files AND adding the device as datasource on the Store).

Besides, the most obvious scenario we want to avoid is when an application, which calls off directly a miner method, crashes. It would cause the indexing operation to fail.

In doing so, we have chosen a different approach using DBus. Now you can send a message to the /org/freedesktop/Tracker1/Miner/Files/Index object, with a mount-point-uri as parameter, and it will tell the tracker-miner-fs daemon to index the Mount accordingly. It also avoids unnecessary crawling of Mounts when more than one application wants their content.

Front-end side: using this mechanism in Documents…

From now on, Documents lists on plugged-in removable devices as collections on the overview. By clicking on a Device Collection, you get it indexed.

What’s next?

A couple of things that I consider essential are:

• Let users Import documents from a device (maybe exporting?)
• Do not index already imported documents

That’s all folks!