I'd like to post here something I learned from an insightful conversation with pvanhoof on IRC #tracker:

- Tracker is an indexer that doesn't touch your data in any way except for reading it and allowing other programs to read it; the team behind it have worked real hard on making it as power efficient.

- Smart search was created by another team who created the Search app. The Search app required an index to function and the team behind it instead of using a plug-in via tracker decided to go it on their own due to regular Nokia politics.

- While you can get away with smart search if done on a PC, you certainly can't get away from it on a mobile device where power efficiency is very crucial.

- Smart search is basically repeating what tracker already does in the most power-inefficient way by running processes as user not as a built-in service hence it sucks up more power than tracker.

- The heads who were supposed to decide on going with one system for indexing decided that since smart search was only powering the Search app to extend its functionality to things like email attachments, choosing ring-tones etc hence we have 2 systems doing the same thing just 1 of them (tracker) being more useful and more power efficient while the other is something if you disable you end up losing some functionality.

- The team behind tracker was decommissioned even before November 2011! Two of them had their contracts expired in November 2011 so since then they have not been able to improve tracker or its bugs.

- The bugs that they received for tracker most of the time have not been related to tracker but assigned to tracker due to tracker being the "easy target". The team have tried numerous times to get other teams who they think may be responsible for issues to conference and fix bugs but they have got 0 positive response from any other team.

- The last bug they fixed was in pr1.2 after which they have had almost NIL contact. Different sub-contractors were commissioned for pr1.3 hence the royal mess we find ourselves with so-called tracker issues since pr1.3 has been out (I'll admit I have been guilty on blaming tracker too wrongly).


MEDIA DISAPPEARANCE
- Corruption of ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs is something not related to tracker and could be further investigated by us using block_dump. However, you would need to enable this and wait for the corruption to occur.

- Media disappearing due to the above error hence is not tracker's fault

- In fact media disappearing is to be blamed on apps using tracker's database; the default apps could be blamed for corruption of database too.

- Any app can corrupt the database with just one variable added hence this is not a tracker limitation but the way things have been arranged.


MESSAGING
- Messages coming from one contact but being assigned to another contact in messaging-ui is another bug that we always blame tracker for.

- This is not true as messaging-ui has its own database not related to tracker (again another mistake to have own db)

- If you check meta.db the messages are assigned correctly but messaging-ui is the one at fault as its own database screws things somewhere.

- In short the coding for messaging-ui has some short-comings hence this "unsolvable" issue

- abustany faces the same issues and when/if free he will try trouble-shooting this further but no guarantees on it being successful.


Finally, the above is what I understood from the conversation so it may mean that due to my re-collection I may have omitted some things or misinterpreted some so please don't blame any people I named above as they have all been very kind to have such a conversation in the first place when Nokia have expressly decided not to have relations with them going as far as to contract some other teams for pr1.3.


Edit: The original smart search issue was highlighted by pvanhoof in his blogpost