On Monday 28 April 2014 05:22:25 Sam M wrote:
Luca,
I think Anton means that he want to uninstall Baloo compeltely from his system, just like I do. He doesn't want any Baloo code on his machine.
That is just crazy. Don't blame the developers for not taking the usecase "I hate baloo" in mind when developing software. They take all use cases that are sane in mind: using search; NOT using search. Most people use search so it is enabled by default; you can add your home folder to the 'ignore' list so it gets disabled automatically. That there are people who just don't want the code on their computer for some 'purity' sake, well, though luck. There's no logical reason for that so nobody put in extra effort to support that. Or would you rather have a few MORE bugs in KMail so you can not only have useful things but also crazy stuff? Welcome to reality...
If you're not subscribed to the openSUSE user support list, I just sent the email I've copied below. Keep in mind how many people may be having issues with Baloo and aren't saying anything. Either they don't know they're having problems with it when they are, or they are and they aren't taking the time to report it. Not everybody is a computer scientist, but this new "feature" should not be forced down everybody's throat just because the KDE team thinks that this is way people should be using their computers.
The vast majority of computer users uses search. Sorry if that hasn't landed for some, but you ARE the exception. Win, Mac, Linux (yes, GNOME has it, too) all use that. 99% of computers can handle it just fine. Baloo indexes ~1000 times faster than Nepomuk and uses ~20 times less memory, putting it on par with the Mac, Windows and other Linux solutions. No reason to not enable it by default, thus. And those few who don't want it can disable it.
In prior version of KDE, Nepomuk's indexing feature was disabled by default, so I never used it. Just for testing purposes, I once tried switching indexing on through the Nepomuk GUI and a process or two started, yet my hard drive didn't seem to be doing anything. Either Nepomuk was broken, or it was unobtrusively indexing my files and didn't hog system resources. It's hard for me to compare Baloo to Nepomuk when, from my impression, Nepomuk wasn't doing anything even when the indexing feature was turned on. Baloo is a whole different story, and I had to turn it off because it was giving me performance problems. I didn't like that by default it's switched on, so the second you log into KDE it starts indexing. I hadn't kept up with any of the changes that were coming with KDE 4.13, and trusted that it would be an improvement over 4.11.4. Therefore, when I was having all types of performance issues related to disk I/O and CPU utilization, it took me time to track down how to finagle with Baloo and stop it. I was surprised that the GUI offers barely any options, and that it's opt-out and not opt-in.
Yes, baloo generates quite a bit of I/O, they've added a patch to throttle that now, I believe. It is actually a kernel issue (anything before 3.14 can not deal well with high I/O). This I/O problem shouldn't take long as Search indexes very fast - thousands of files per second. In case it bumps into files which can't be indexed, it will try to determine what file is un-indexable and then disable indexing for that file for the future. Unfortunately, determining what file is hard to index takes a while - about 30 minutes of full cpu and IO at most, per broken file. This has been decreased for 3.14.1 to about 5 minutes at most and will stop/not happen on battery power. Yes, Nepomuk never had this issue because it simply as so slow that it wouldn't eat the entire I/O of a system and I guess the devs use newer kernels that deal with it better so they didn't notice. It's fixed and I think these patches are now in openSUSE Current.
I looked around the internet some, and I found a funny post on the Kubuntu forum:
"After a few days baloo settled down on my system but on my wife's laptop baloo kept going and going for days making it really difficult to do anything. I found a message that ~/.kde/share/config/ baloofilerc has a line in it under [Basic Settings] Indexing-Enabled=true I changed that to Indexing-Enabled=false and the laptop was useable again, but lost a few search items. It's nice when it works but hell when it hogs the system."
I love the beginning where he says: "After a few days", and keep in mind that the 2.5" hard drive on his wife's laptop isn't exactly an icon for longevity. I can only imagine the wear and tear the first iteration of Baloo is doing to SSD's. Baloo shouldn't start automatically the first time a user logs into KDE, but I hate when OS's ask you questions through a dialogue box when you just want to get stuff done. I don't have an answer to how this should be done correctly, but I want to reaffirm that Baloo should _not_ start indexing anything without the user's permission. They're already talking about allowing it to be uninstalled by having the Baloo package be split. I want this, because I want to uninstall it. And if my supposition is correct, I don't think I'll ever be installing it again -- not that I don't think it can become better. I just don't need it.
It is easy to disable (add your home folder to the 'do not index' list in the GUI and it disables itself automatically) and as I said before, the vast majority of the computer users on this planet is already used to using search, both on the internet and on their home computers. The fact that you KNOW what it is in the first place makes you an exception (like me, yes). Don't force openSUSE developers or KDE developers to optimize for YOUR use case and ignore the normal users, please. Bugs and issues should be fixed, we shouldn't optimize for geeks like ourselves.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 4:48 AM, Luca Beltrame <lbeltrame@kde.org> wrote:
In data lunedì 28 aprile 2014 07:01:47, Anton Aylward ha scritto:
Yes I know how to disable indexing. My point is that I don't want the code; it adds complexity and hence the potential for flaws to many
Sorry, but this argument doesn't make sense. This is Free Software. How are you going to prevent people from writing code?
There are a lot of things one can do to improve FOSS, including even harsh criticism. But saying "I don't want the code" isn't, sorry.
-- Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team KDE Science supporter GPG key ID: 6E1A4E79
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