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by m_ram 4421 days ago
From your first link:

"There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index."

This philosophy is why I stopped using GNOME and now prefer Xfce. I'm looking forward to trying LXQt when it's more stable.
1 comments
timtadh 4421 days ago
Yeah, the developer has a really strange take on indexing. I got into a bit of an argument about it with him on a bug tracker. Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me. The system is a wrapper around Xapian (http://xapian.org/) and Sqlite, as with any full text index when you try and put things which are huge into the index it is going to explode the index. Which is what happened to me. It also indexes source code which is fairly useless. (Although to be fair they have (today) blacklisted source code https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... )

EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo! https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... which is great news.

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Zancarius 4421 days ago
> EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo!

FINALLY. Thanks for digging this up. Having no means of presently disabling it through the UI seems unnecessarily user-hostile.

> Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, Baloo seemed to happily go about its business indexing precisely everything I told it not to, even to the extent of ignoring child directories of those I specified in the ignored directory list. I suspect that was a bug, but considering the suggestion in lieu of a button to disable the feature was "just add your home directory and it'll do the right thing" (which didn't work) is counter productive.

Sigh.

I can understand being excited about a new feature and (possibly) being one of its only proponents, and occasionally something good surfaces from such thankless chores. But I sometimes have to wonder what the motivation is to staunchly defend decisions that seem rather... myopic. Ordinarily I wouldn't care, but pounding the heck out of partitions and NFS mounts to do something that I can do quickly and simply with grep and find is just insanity.

On the other hand, now I understand why xapian-core is listed as a dependency.

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