What is baloo_file_extractor and why is it humping my hard drive?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday, 2014-04-18, 10:27:09, O.Sinclair wrote:
> On Friday 18 April 2014 9:51:21 AM Kevin Krammer wrote:

> > I think it is important to consider that tags are not the only metadata a
> > file can have.
> > 
> > Quite some metadata is automatic, either inherent in the actual data
> > itself
> > of attached as part of the storage format.
> > 
> > Music has duration, genre, artist, probably rating, etc.
> > Pictures have size, timestamp, potentially geo information, also rating,
> > etc.
> > 
> > Tags are only one kind of information that can be associated with a piece
> > of user data.
> > Dismissing a concept because one form of input isn't used is to me a bit
> > like saying there is no use for computers because nobody re-types all
> > their
> > handwritten letters.
> > As if computers could only ever be used to write text documents :)

> good point and I am happy to acknowledge that I do use desktop search
> (nepomuk, now baloo) frequently. Despite the lack of tag search.
> 
> Still, why enable tagging but no tag search?

No idea.
My guess is that it is a lot easier to offer a universally useful tagging UI 
that application developers can easily incorporate while searching is more 
tied to the respective application's needs and needs to be done individually.

There was a quite interesting Google Summer of Code project last year on 
providing some advanced UI pieces that application developers can use but the 
move to Baloo probably makes it necessary to at least port this before it can 
be provided as a general library.

http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2013/StatusReports#Denis_Steckelmacher

> And I still will say that the
> whole desktop search actually is a "power user" thing.  Does not mean that
> computers are not used instead of handwriting but that many users are not
> even aware of the "superkey" in Windows or the ALT-F2 in KDE.

Global search might always be, though I've seen people use its equivalent OSX 
feature. A OSV or admin could probably configure their desktop setup such that 
a search line is always present.

My take on the search thing is that it will at first mostly be integrated at 
the application level, e.g. Digikam providing a specialied UI to search for 
photos. That might then even include tag search since photos are traditionally 
more often tagged than other stuff.

> Still, to get off my ranting:
> 1. there is a known bug in Baloo that sometimes creates bad disk access,
> search it as I can not remember the exact cause
> 2. in my opinion Baloo is a far better concept than Nepomuk
> 3. I do not agree on the "simplified" kcm, I liked the old one better

I am expecting this to change in newer releases. There was quite some 
discontent with the current interface on a developer list so I am somewhat 
assuming that this will be looked at by a usability person at some point, 
probably this year's Akademy.

> 4. and I think semantic search should be disabled for the user to enable by
> default, not the other way around

I think the indexing should be disabled by default but not the search itself.
That way it can be used in applications instead of each developer rolling 
their own but not having something go off an unannounced.

File indexing could then be offered when a user starts searching e.g. in 
Dolphin.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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