TinySPARQL's FAQ

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Hi :slight_smile:

Continuing the discussion from Corrections on Tracker's FAQ:

Is there a simple TinySPARQL’s FAQ somewhere?
Has the faq.md file been moved, or has it been completely removed?

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Hello,

I honestly have got a bit lost about docs for search in GNOME – my volunteer time has been spent on QA stuff recently so my contributions around search are minimal at best.

TinySPARQL is a database library, i don’t think it ever had its own FAQ. All the docs we have for that are accessible via https://tinysparql.org.

In the old days of “Tracker” and “Tracker Miners”, we didn’t have such a clear separation between the database code and the filesystem indexer. At one point in 2020 or so I made a “Tracker website”, which lived in tracker.git (now tinysparql.git) and did have an FAQ. None of the content was relevant to the database library, though – it was all about the filesystem indexer and about desktop search in GNOME.

I’m not sure what happened to that FAQ – the “Tracker website” that I set up was later replaced by https://tracker.gnome.org/, which confusingly is now a website about TinySPARQL. I’m not sure how that happened or what we should do with https://tracker.gnome.org – do you have any ideas? (I do know that the website repo for tracker.gnome.org is here, at least).

The project has some open issues related this as well:

Finally, the old FAQ can be found in the tinysparql.git history around the 3.3.0 tag:

Paging @carlosg and @jimmac who might be able to give you more of a useful update :slight_smile:

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Hi,

Thank you @Thomas_DC, I appreciate your interest in TinySPARQL.

Your contributions caught us in a bit of a transitional period wrt documentation and websites for TinySPARQL and LocalSearch. As @sthursfield explained, the previous site was somewhat centered on the indexer bits and not so much on the library.

Currently, both projects do generate only documentation through GitLab pages:

Next up in the roadmap would be:

  • Setting up an user-facing website for the TinySPARQL project so it is available at our tinysparql.org domain. This should explain the scope and benefits of the library, offer download links, etc.
  • Same for LocalSearch? I personally do feel less strongly about this one, as it is an intermediate component of the GNOME desktop with little user interaction bits. But this would be the natural place for the old FAQ.

Since this shuffling started, we’ve been unclear on what to do with the tracker.gnome.org site. It could be repurposed to become the recipient for either TinySPARQL or LocalSearch user-facing site, but so far we’ve pushed it forward with no clear plan yet. We certainly won’t waste the fine art from @jimmac. As for the tracker. subdomain itself, we should probably move away from it.

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Forgot to mention, I once wrote README: Highlight the possible advantages to using TinySPARQL (!713) · Merge requests · GNOME / TinySPARQL · GitLab as a content braindump for a possible tinysparql website. It would be nice if the website was fluffier than a wall of text, though.

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I’d like to make clear I’m open to killing darlings. It is way more important to keep clarity than preserve some pixel art. Dropping tracker.gnome.org is a perfectly valid way forward. Having irrelevant/confusing bits of info is bad, even if it wears a nice lipstick.

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