WTF is Tracker and Why is it Using All of My Memory?

Recently, I updated by Debian testing XFCE desktop. Nothing unusual
there, I've been using Debian for many years and after the gnome3
disaster, have pretty much settled on XFCE. This update brought in a
surprise, however. My desktop with 3GB of RAM was sluggish, and
'top' showed I was using all my RAM *and* 500MB of swap. Hmmm...

slugmax@foo:~$ ps ax -o rss,user,command | sort -nr | head -n 10
1445784 slugmax /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs ...

What. The. Fuck. I'd never heard of 'tracker-miner-fs' before, yet
here it was soaking up half my RAM. I look to see where this thing
is starting.

slugmax@foo:~$ ack-grep -a tracker /etc/ /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop
24:Name[sl]=Shramba tracker
25:Exec=/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-store
26:X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=tracker /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-
   fs.desktop
27:Exec=/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
...

So a bloated Gnome utility is being started by my XFCE session
manager? Sure enough, checking the XFCE settings reveals the desktop
search tool tracker has been set to autostart at login.  Here are
the packages installed, probably brought in as a "dependency", since
I had given Gnome3 a try.


root@foo:/etc/xdg/autostart# dpkg -l | grep tracker
ii libtracker-client-0.8-0 metadata database, indexer and search tool - library
ii libtracker-extract-0.12-0 tracker extractor library
ii libtracker-miner-0.12-0 tracker data miner library
ii libtracker-sparql-0.12-0 metadata database, indexer and search tool - library
ii tracker metadata database, indexer and search tool
ii tracker-extract metadata database, indexer and search tool - metadata extractors
ii tracker-gui metadata database, indexer and search tool - GNOME frontends
ii tracker-miner-evolution metadata database, indexer and search tool - evolution plugin
ii tracker-miner-fs metadata database, indexer and search tool - filesystem indexer
ii tracker-utils metadata database, indexer and search tool - commandline tools
...

But why was this enabled in XFCE, by default and with no warning? A
bit of searching showed some other guy wondering the same thing
about his KDE desktop. So lemme get this straight, a bloated Gnome
desktop search utility (reminds me of the last bloated desktop
search utility from Gnome, called "beagle") is being started with my
XFCE desktop session? I stopped using Gnome to get away from these
ridiculous, un-customizable and unusable utilities meant for the
unwashed masses. GNU findutils and pdfgrep work just fine for me,
thanks. Mutt lets me search my email in a myriad of ways. So next
time at least ask me if I want this thing.