Warming up

Hey former Harmattan peeps. How about we do a little bit of this Jolla stuff after our hours and see where it goes? You never know, and neither have any of the technologies and improvements that we did for Nokia harmed us. It’s at #jollamobile on FreeNode. Btw. Ping me if you are going to FOSDEM. Maybe we can discuss how we can revive some of our Harmattan projects? Personally, I’m thinking about reducing the role of Tracker’s FS miner in Jolla by first refactoring libtracker-extract and adapting buteo to call for metadata extraction instead of letting miner-fs pick the newly added files up. Dead to file system monitoring on phones!

At the same time I’m also working with Calligra a lot lately. Which is by the way awesome stuff. Can’t choose.

9 thoughts on “Warming up”

  1. +1 to that, I stil have nightmares sometimes when I remember the virtual emission of CHANGES_DONE_HINT [*] and Tracker extracting the file multiple times during the MTP transfer….

    So, letting buteo notify about files being transferred through MTP will work only if MTP being used in the transfer. So am I right assuming that the user won’t be able to use the disk as a standard ‘mass storage’ mount in those devices?

    [*] The Jolla guys should have glib patched to remove that (as we did in MeeGo Harmattan)… otherwise bad things will happen.

    1. Yes, the guys on #jollamobile told me that they won’t support USB mass storage mode and that because of that the only way to get files on the device should be through the MTP daemon.

      I just started writing a new API for libtracker-extract to make it a single call for such an MTP daemon to bypass miner-fs and to allow using their own URL as target nie:url.

      So that way they can write the file in /tmp and on completion move it to the real destination. And meanwhile insert the sparql for the real destination.

      So far I encountered only the volume datasource handling to be lacking in libtracker-extract. Since the .in files for the extractor modules everything else seems to be in the right locations and accessible except the volume stuff. That’s by the way the miner_files_add_to_datasource call in tracker-miner-file.c

      I don’t know about the CHANGES_DONE_HINT stuff. Perhaps join their channel and notify them about this?

      More info and discussion here.

      1. Wow, no mass storage? That’s… almost a deal breaker for me.

        Is there an explanation somewhere for that decision?

        1. You should be glad, USB mass storage is nothing but a hack, at least to get it working with the OS that everybody wants it to work with, Windows.

          For that the device must use a fscking.vfat FAT32 partition. There are far far better filesystems for modern phones and tablets than FAT32, but sadly having to support USB mass storage often means that you can’t use something else on the partition where user data is stored. That’s just sad. Thank you Microsoft for not supporting any sensible filesystem (that you didn’t patent so that it’s still impossible to use).

          No, really, don’t cry for USB mass storage being thrown out. It’s the best thing to do and by the time the Jolla phone is in your pocket, your devices and operating systems will all support MTP perfectly (if not already). Including Windows, Android, iOS, N9, N900, etc.

      2. I don’t think you’ll actually need any volume stuff handling if you’re narrowing the scope to buteo-notified files. Volume stuff was handy for the mass storage mode (i.e. files are ‘available’ or ‘not available’ based on the volume being mounted or not).

        But of course, if the new logic is supposed to go upstream, you’ll need the volume info in those calls as well, yes…

        1. The idea is to get the exact same RDF as miner-fs will also produce. That way it’ll be for miner-fs as if the file was already there, in case miner-fs still runs and is monitoring the directories for which the MTP daemon is managing the initial inserts.

  2. What about the rumors that the Jolla UX is not going to be open source? Guess that’s off the table now, you wouldn’t rallye people to contribute to a closed product?

    1. Jolla UX is not the same as all of Jolla’s software. Jolla is definitely using a lot of open source. Take a look at SailfishOS, Nemo Mobile and Mer. My best guess is that it’ll be very similar to Fremantle (N900) and Harmattan (N9): those phones also contain closed parts. Yet they are both phones that are great platforms for open source development.

      I’m btw not a purist free software guy (at all), I just happen to prefer open source whenever possible. So I rally people for all sorts of causes, including sometimes closed products.

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