Be more encompassing about what get indexed
Currently, Tracker only automatically indexes the XDG folders. There's an obvious problem with this: if you create additional directories, or an app creates additional directories, then their contents don't get indexed. This leads to a situation where search results are patchy - in some cases your search will return the results that you're after, in others it inexplicably won't. This in turn results in a situation where we are training users to avoid using search (be it through gnome-shell, or nautilus, or some place else).
I think that it's therefore important to be more maximalist regarding what gets indexed.
Exactly how this might work will need discussion. Some initial questions:
- Should there be a way for users to exclude directories from being indexed? (Probably.)
- Should apps be able to request that certain directories aren't indexed? (For example, Builder could request that
~/Projects
doesn't get indexed, or ebooks app could say that it wants to be the sole search provider for its own data.) - Could we automatically not index directories if the resource usage is going to be too great?
- Can we exclude directories based on some predefined names (for example,
checkout
)? - Can we index particular files of interest, even if they are in directories that are excluded from indexing? Maybe I don't want to index all of
~/checkout
, but there's a bunch of files that I keep coming back to from that directory, which it would make sense to include in search.