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

[Sebastian Trüg]

On 06/20/2011 12:12 PM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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

This is all due to you running git master. :)
We changed a lot for 4.7 and did not reach stability yet. We also still
tend to use git like svn which will hopefully change in the 4.8 cycle.

> 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.

Most stability issues are only with the indexer due to libstreamanalyzer
plugins crashing or hanging. IMHO this is no reason not to start
something fancy.

> 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.

That would be great. We started a test framework once but did never
finish it.

> 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.

That would be great indeed. Many of the bugs that have been open for a
long time are issues that I myself was never able to reproduce.

> In the meantime I could start writing about media library ideas on my 
> blog so that KDE usability folks can get involved as well.

Looking forward to that. :)

Cheers,
Sebastian