Comment 3 for bug 771513

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Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup) wrote : Re: [Bug 771513] Re: File search should use Tracker when available

Right. Things are deceptionally simple however. We'd need to
deduplicate the results bewteen ZG and T otherwise the user experience
would be pretty crappy. And since we'd query both of the sources
asynchronously we'd have to remove the dupes from the slowest of
these.

Adding to that we don't want results to "jump around" when the slower
source arrives with results - in other words - slow results *must* be
appended to the end of the results list. This doesn't play well with
sorting by timestamp obviously (or any kind of sorting in fact) since
this breaks unless you insert results at the right point in time. So
these two issues would basically force us to always show results from
the slowest source - adding to that some pretty non-trivial logic to
keep the results sets sane.

So from a technical POW I think it makes more sense to either:

 a) Integrate Tracker and Zeitgeist at a lower level making extra
logic in the lens daemon unnecessary
 b) Make ZG be aware of all the things that users expect to find
 c) Write a standalone Tracker powered files lens

I'm pretty sure there will be people working on all of these points to
some degree - perhaps you can be one them?! :-) So time will tell
which one prevails. The user experience should be the top priority -
not which libraries or tools we use under the hood.