Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Ben Sturmfels]

Hi Folks!

I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
outside of Guix?

Specific issues:

 * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
   one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
   often)

 * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
   display any matches for the *contents* of files, only the filenames -
   I thought indexing the contents was the whole point

 * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
   and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it

 * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there doesn't
   appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
   see what's going on

I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
Gnome Tweak Tool.

Debugging Tracker:

After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
restart it with some debugging information using:

env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status 
/gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3

This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
not exactly what it's indexing.

Regards,
Ben