[Owncloud] Trackerd based server side search app

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 08.04.2012, at 15:45, Jörn Friedrich Dreyer <jfd at butonic.de> wrote:

> 
> Am 08.04.2012 11:14 schrieb "Frank Karlitschek" <frank at owncloud.org>:
> > The problem is, of course, that it has external dependencies like tracker obviously but it can still be very useful for power users who have tracerd running. So this is a nice optional feature imho.
> Indeed, running trackerd requires shell access to the server and will sadly not be useable out of the box. I looked at the scanning code of the gallery but did not find a nicer way, yet.
> 
> > The challenge is that indexing has to be done through ownCloud because this is the only way to access encrypted, shared and remote files.
> I feared you might ask something like this ;)

Hehe. Sorry :)

> 
> > Do you think tracer can access the ownCloud files via WebDAB? or do we have to provide a different interface?
> To be honest, I don't think it makes much sense to introduce another layer like davfs2 to let trackerd index the content via a webdav share. The setup is fragile as it is, but works for my personal use case where I do not need encryption on the server side. Nevertheless, I understand the requirement for full text search of encrypted files. I would argue that the extracted index itself reveals a lot of information about the encrypted content, thus it kind of defeats the purpose.
> While my heart as a software engineer is bleeding even thinking about it, I fear the best way to provide full text search for ownCloud is to port the indexing algorithm to PHP:
> - It will get rid of external dependencies.
> - Index and meta information can be updated upon access via webdav or the webfrontend.
> - Searching can take file permissions into consideration (other than just filtering the results by path...)

This sounds like a huge task.

> I'll think on this till the developer meeting.

Let´s talk about this next weekend :-)




> So long
> 
> Jörn

CU

Frank