[Nepomuk] Re: Some conclusions/ideas after 2 weeks with the project

[Mario Fux]

Am Montag 20 Juni 2011, 12.12:28 schrieb Paweł Paprota:
> Hello,

Morning Pawel

> I've been digging into the Nepomuk project for the last two weeks. I
> started with the idea of using Nepomuk as a basis for a media library
> component - kind of a semantic representation of user's movies/TV shows,
> music etc. Quite similar to what XBMC project is doing but with Nepomuk
> underneath and KDE (possibly Dolphin?) as a user facing UI.

Sounds very interesting.

> However, right now I feel like this work should be postponed because of
> the problems I'm having with the project itself. For example right now
> Nepomuk is not able to index my home directory. One of the causes is:
> 
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276056
> 
> Sometimes nepomukindexer crashes (I have a core dump indicating there is
> an assertion failure in Strigi) and indexing hangs. Also I had to
> exclude *.pdf from being indexed because of:
> 
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=274895
> 
> I see a lot of open crash level reports in Bugzilla. I don't feel I
> should proceed with adding new functionality (media library) before
> stability issues are somehow resolved and there is a regression test
> suite for this kind of issues.

Thx for filing the bug reports.

> I thought about preparing a continuous integration environment for
> Nepomuk so crash/load/unit tests could be run constantly or at least
> after each commit. This is a normal thing for me to do in commercial
> projects. Especially with this kind of component there should be stress
> tests running all the time - otherwise it's the users who will encounter
> crashes/hangs etc. and indeed they do as is represented by state of
> Bugzilla reports.
> 
> Sadly I've just cancelled my Linode account few weeks ago because I
> haven't had the time to use my virtual machines - otherwise we could use
> my account to launch CI server and run tests there.
> 
> However, I'm sure the infrastructure can be set up other ways, in the
> end I could simply create (and pay...) for new Linode account.
> 
> First I would like to know your opinion about what I should do right now
> because I am torn. In my commercial projects I can't stand it when there
> are open bugs at the level above major, especially crashers and
> blockers. I would love to be able to further familiarize myself with
> Nepomuk by triaging existing bugs and trying to track down, reproduce
> and test crash/blocking bugs.
> 
> In the meantime I could start writing about media library ideas on my
> blog so that KDE usability folks can get involved as well.
> 
> What do you think?

I'm currently not a developer for Nepomuk but I think it would be great if you 
could invest time in fixing bugs and setting up a testing framework. I'm sure 
vhanda or trueg will comment on your mail soon.

And I'm eager to read your blog about the media library.

thx
Mario