Last month in Tracker

Here’s an incomplete report of some work done on Tracker during the last month!

Bugs

Jean Felder fixed a thorny issue that was causing wrong track durations for MP3s.

Rasmus Thomsen has been testing on Alpine Linux, fixing one issue and finding several more. Alpine Linux uses musl libc instead of the more common GNU libc, which triggers bugs that we don’t usually see. Finding and fixing these issues could be a great learning experience for someone who wants to dig deep into the platform!

There’s an ongoing issue reported by many Ubuntu users which seems to be due to SQLite database corruption. SQLite is rather a black box to me, so I don’t know how or when we might get to the bottom of why this corruption is happening.

Ubuntu CI

We now test each commit on Ubuntu as well as Fedora. This a nice step forwards. It’s also triggering more intermittent failures in the CI — we’ve made huge progress in the last few years on bringing the CI up from zero, but there are some latent issues like these which we need to get rid of.

Tracker 3.0

Carlos has done more architectural work in the ‘master’ branch, working towards having a generic SPARQL store in tracker.git, and all GNOME/desktop/filesystem related code in tracker-miners.git.

As part of this, the tracker CLI tool is now split between tracker.git and tracker-miners.git (MR1, MR2).

We also moved the libtracker-control and libtracker-miner libraries into tracker-miners.git, and made the libtracker-control API private. As far as I know, the libtracker-control library is only being used by GNOME Photos to manage indexing of removable devices. We want to keep track of which apps need porting to 3.0, so please let me know if this is going to affect anything else.

New website

Tracker is famous enough that it merits a real website, not just an outdated set of wiki pages. So I made a real Tracker website, aiming to collect links to relevant user and developer documentation and to have a minimal overview and FAQ section. We can build and deploy this straight from the tracker.git repo, so whereas the wiki is easily forgotten, the new website lives in the same repo as the sourcecode. The next step will be to merge this and then tidy up most of the old wiki pages