14 DAY TRIAL // We reported the other day that the GNOME developers released the third snapshot towards the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, meaning that many of the core components and apps were improved.
Tracker, the open-source semantic data store software, which is responsible for indexing different sources needed for the search engine integration of the GNOME desktop environment, implemented via GNOME Shell and other apps from the GNOME Stack, has been updated to version 1.9.0.
The current stable branch of Tracker is the 1.8 series, for the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, but the development for the major Tracker 1.10 release is currently taking place under the Tracker 1.9.x umbrella. Tracker 1.9.0 is the first in the new development cycle for GNOME 3.22, and it looks like it brings many new features.
What's new in Tracker 1.9.0
According to the internal changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, Tracker will now adapt to the new GKqueue monitor mapping. This should greatly improve its overall performance, recognize DjVu files, enhance the console output of tracker subcommands, as well as add Microsoft Office "owner files" to the list of ignored files.
Additionally, regular expressions are now supported for the fn:replace feature, album art from the TPE2 tag in the MP3 extractor is supported as well, and there's now a "tracker reset -f $filename" subcommand. "This will recursively reset all indexed content for the given filename/uri, and trigger reindexing if appropriate, so contents are just like freshly indexed," the developers have explained.
If you want an early taste, you can download the Tracker 1.9.0 sources right now via our website, compile and install it for your GNU/Linux operating system. However, please note that you can also test it as part of the GNOME 3.21.3 development release. Again, try to keep in mind that Tracker 1.9.0 and GNOME 3.21.2 are pre-release versions, which means that some bugs might be present.