Hi GNOME developers,
During the GNOME 47 cycle we are aiming to soft-rename these two components.
As of today, the Gitlab projects are renamed:
- GNOME/tracker → GNOME/tinysparql
- GNOME/tracker-miners → GNOME/localsearch
Additionally, the default branch is now ‘main’ in both repos, changed from ‘master’.
What you need to do
You can continue to use the existing repo names, as Gitlab will redirect automatically. Please update to the new names in any flatpak manifests etc. when you have time. Translation infra might also need updating.
You need to update ‘master’ to ‘main’ if you are referring directly to the default branch. (We will keep a ‘master’ ref around during the GNOME 47 cycle but it may become stale).
There is a new libtinysparql (‘Tsparql’) API provided by TinySPARQL, but you can continue to use the existing libtracker-sparql (‘Tracker’) API until further notice. See the rename MR for more details.
The filesystem indexer is now org.freedesktop.LocalSearch3 on D-Bus. The old busname org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files can still be used until further notice. Again, see the rename MR for full details.
The tracker3 CLI tool is now split to tinysparql3 and localsearch3 programs.
I’m sure there will be more places we use the name ‘tracker’, and that’s fine, just please try to use the new names from now on, and please help us by making whatever updates you can, when convenient.
Please do let us know if you see any issues following the soft-rename.
Why?
Well… we will do a more public announcement for distributors and end-users in a month or two, once we have shaken out any technical issues.
If you’ve been around GNOME for a while you’ll have heard the odd comment of… “Why does my system have a Tracker Miner?”. These terms were innocent in 2006 when the project was created but have developed some unwelcome connotations since.
We chose the indexer’s new name LocalSearch to describe what the indexer actually does as of 2024: it creates a local search index for the files that are available to the local user.
Around 2020 we separated the SPARQL database engine from the filesystem indexer. As far as we know its the only lightweight, open source SPARQL database that exists. The new name TinySPARQL was chosen to highlight this, and we hope it will take on some life in the wider world.
