Comment 8 for bug 1666676

Hey Jorge,
great questions! Carlos Garnacho answered pretty well.
Nautilus doesn't really need to display that we are indexing the files or so, since it's done in low priority it will be done when it's done. The user shouldn't see a performance issue with that (if the kernel scheduler works as intended).

Hey Martin,
"So all of this tells me that tracker isn't a replacement for typeahead search."
No, tracker is an indexing tool that Nautilus uses.
"Typeahead search only affects the currently displayed directory"
Yeah, with tracker and the latest improvement in Nautilus search I think it fulfils this use case (+ the whole recursive search use case of course).
"Tracker imposes a huge cost due to always indexing everything"
As long as is low priority and the kernel scheduler works fine it shouldn't be an issue.

"So I don't see how "enable tracker" can ever be a replacement for typeahead search"
Maybe I was not clear enough in my first post. (don't mean to be rude, just clear) Tracker is needed for search in Nautilus. Period. Then, one of the use cases of Nautilus search is searching an item in the current directory, which the result is quite close to type-ahead (with the latest UI improvements we did for this specific use case).

"I see tracker as a nice opt-in"
No, not really. We rely on that not only for fast searches but also for:
- Showing part of the text of the files you are searching for (Planned feature, although we already rank the files by that too)
- Advanced search by filters and UI (Already in there)
- Advanced search by tags and UI (Planned feature)
- Batch renaming tool. Is required for all the metadata, artist name and album for musics, Camera device for the pictures etc. (Already in there, quite sad Ubuntu won't be able to use the new batch renaming dialog we implemented)

We rely on an indexing tool for a modern application and good experience and for any feature we are planning to introduce. Even if Ubuntu decide to enable type-ahead with a downstream patch, an indexing tool for Nautilus will still be necessary and is far broader than just fulfilling the type-ahead use case. It's needed for the type-ahead case, but by far it's not the only thing it's needed for, and unfortunately is becoming a burden maintenance to have the indexing tool optional in Nautilus.

The indexing tool we decided to use and work for us is Tracker. I don't really care using something different if in a future there is a better indexing tool that provides us with the same features and maintainability and interaction with upstream. But the reality now is this one.

I agree with Carlos Garnacho though, personally I'm completely fine with either decision, I just think we are in a lose-lose situation, and would love to fix it in a not very complex way :)