Search does not find anything if files name is partly written

[Thermaltaker]

The search-applet in hardy still does not find files if filenames are only parly inserted. For Example:

If I search for christina.....everthing is fine and it shows me a variety of file I wanted to search for.
But If I search for christ.... nothing appears.

This bug exist since gutsy and hasnt been fixed. I think its an critical bug for hardy if you really want companys to use it.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Thermaltaker (dennis-benndorf)]

I have installed a clean 8.10 and after this tracker is not even activated. I had to activate it in the system menu.
After that I created a text document in my home directory name "tabularasa". After tracker was finished with idexing
I searched for "tabu" and it found nothing. If I search for "tabularasa" he finds it.

But this cant be the mission of the application or is it ? ;-)

Greetz therm

[Thermaltaker (dennis-benndorf)]

Added a bugreport at bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565945
Maybe there is somebody who cars...

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for doing it.

[Thermaltaker (dennis-benndorf)]

This is what the developers said:

"Phrase queries are not yet supported in tracker. They are almost impossible to
implement with the current QDBM index.

We plan to move to sqlite FTS (at some point) and the FTS query language
supports this kind of queries."

Thats a pitty for a otherwise nice search programm....

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

I agree this kind of feature is quite essential for a desktop search engine.

If tracker can't do it, couldn't deskbar-applet work around it? There is locate, which has a quite capable filename search engine. Wouldn't it be possible to write a simple deskbar plugin that queries "locate -i ~/'*$SEARCHTERM*'" as you type?

Deskbar has the advantage of taking multiple sources into account, and if tracker simply isn't designed for finding files by name, then use the tools that are.

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

Attached is a deskbar plugin that uses locate to search for files by name.

Since this is my first attempt to write a deskbar plugin, there might be space for improvement. But it seems to do its job, so this might be at least a starting point.

[Thermaltaker (dennis-benndorf)]

Got an Email from Bugzilla saying:

"SQLite FTS is in tracker master now and this supports prefix and phrase
queries."

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397355

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Indeed. I'm currently in the process of packaging GIT master and Karmic will have this in the next couple of weeks or so.