A nice feature Apple has is the ability of accessing a window-specific dialog right from their title bar.
I think that would be pretty useful in Documents’ context as well. So I’ve written this small patch.
I’ve been pointed out that it duplicates the access to the Properties dialog. We already have that on the hamburger menu. But still, I think that would be cool. What do you think?
Hey,
I can believe it’s over. This Summer passed way too fast! It was a great opportunity of learning more about free software development, programming, and GNOME.
To describe and evaluate my Google Summer of Code, I have chosen an interview-style post. I think this is the most efficient way of describing my internship experience.
The satisfaction of feeling part of something bigger than yourself. To work side-by-side with people really engaged in software development.
Definitely it was conciliating the program with my university duties, since it’s not summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Although getting familiar with large projects, such as Tracker, was hard as well.
Cosimo is a great person and has been a great mentor. He has been patient in leading me to the right direction, pointing me what to do, and teaching me what was needed.
It’s easy to point mistakes but they are part of the learning process. You got to learn from your mistakes to not repeat them.
I could have started my work in Documents UI sooner to have more time to polish/enhance/improve it. Also, I could have asked [more] for help and completed the Tracker task in lesser time.
Incentivate interns to attend GUADEC. It is an environment of creativity and innovation which certainly will inspire students to get involved even more with the community.
The original proposal was: “To make GNOME Documents able to manage and view files on plugged in removable devices. Including extending Tracker to provide the APIs we need to implement the feature.”
The ‘IndexFileForProcess‘ API method has been created. It lets client-applications call Tracker to index files/directories/mount-points transparently on an application basis (you can read more about it in my last report). This mechanism works nicely for what we want in Documents.
Documents is able to recognize a plugged-in removable device, create a ‘virtual’ collection containing all the documents inside the device.
Software is never done! So I’m committing myself to getting these things [gnome] done. 🙂
In addition to finish what’s left in my task, I want to apply for a GNOME Foundation membership, and keep contributing to GNOME.
I want to thank the GNOME community for helping students get involved with free software development, Google for giving me the opportunity of work with GNOME, Cosimo Cecchi for guiding me in my project, and you for reading this long report. 🙂
Cheers!
Felipe.
Hey, this is not my GSoC final report. 🙂
I didn’t expect to be still talking about my work on Tracker at this time, but Martyn Russel has made some nice suggestions of modifications to my code on his review of my patch. The ‘IndexMount’ DBus method has been exchanged for an ‘IndexFileForProcess’ DBus method. It’s a more generic mechanism which allows Tracker to index files on a client-application basis.
It works almost equally to the old ‘IndexMount’. Receives a request-to-index a file/directory/mount-point and watches the bus name of the calling application. It stops the indexing process when no bus names are associated to the file.
I am not that late, I am also working in Documents. Currently Documents loads plugged-in removable devices, uses the Tracker mechanism I’ve described in the previous paragraph to index them, and creates a Device Collection into the overview containing documents inside the device.
I am preparing a preview for my GSoC Final Report (that I will post tomorrow).
See you! 😉
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.
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.
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.
A couple of things that I consider essential are:
That’s all folks!
It is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but it is going to be warm because my GSoC proposal was accepted.
I am going to work on Documents in order to make it able to manage and view files on plugged in removable devices. This is a feature proposed by Cosimo Cecchi, who is my mentor in the program.
In this blog I am going to log my progress weekly. Keep tuned for updates here!