Plasma search and one other

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday March 23 2017 04:44:23 Duncan wrote:

>Note that until quite recently, plasma "required" baloo (the indexing 
>daemon) at build-time, failing configure with a baloo-not-found error if 

Careful here. There's the Baloo framework which does indeed contain the indexing executables (on Linux) but I'm not aware that those are launched by default. They're not in my "Neon" style KF5 build.
It's my understanding that the Baloo framework provides the basic functionality but that other dependencies (packages) are required to use the search and indexing features.

John: have you tried adding your root directory to the list of locations NOT to search in systemsettings/Search/File Search? 


>Fortunately, baloo has other bugs, including serious breakage in 32-bit 
>x86 (segfault when the index file gets over 2 GiB, IIRC, used to be a 
>common problem on x86, still is in baloo, as it has been basically 
>maintainerless for some time and nobody has bothered figuring out and 
>testing a patch properly), so at some point when that came up in a 

Why would they, none of them is using 32bit fossils anymore ;)


>After some discussion, the plasma devs decided making baloo optional was 
>a good idea, even if one of them in particular would normally have been 
>in favor of keeping it mandatory. 

Let me guess, the same dev who would have been dead-set against allowing it outside of Plasma if that were possible? O:-)

>But it finally was an official option again, so gentoo/kde could make it 
>a proper USE flag again, and I could drop my monkey-patches. =:^)

Pray tell, which packages and what's the name of the option? I don't see anything relevant in plasma-workspace and plasma-desktop (master branches).

>But as I said, that's fairly recent.  Since I'm running live-git, I tend 
>to lose track of versioning and can't tell you exactly when the option 
>was introduced, but it's there now, even if somewhat recent.

Yes you can: check out the project, do a `git blame` on the file containing the option definition and check the annotation of the corresponding line ;)

>Meanwhile, most binary-based distros will of course continue to ship with 
>the build-time baloo option enabled, meaning they build against it, and 
>are very unlikely to support actually uninstalling it.

Even for the Baloo framework and the indexing executables this will depend how they package the thing. 

>Unfortunately, AFAIK kdepim based packages still require akonadi and 
>think baloo or some other semantic-desktop junk too.  But I'm no longer 

Last time I checked they don't or include their own fork of an older version that is used only for email indexing. In any case a kdepim dev ensured me that email indexing would work even on platforms where Baloo doesn't (= Mac and MSWin).

>Some versions of cmake have problems following all those symlinks at 
>least as the baloo cmake build was setup and would trigger baloo build 

Let me guess, you ended up with /usr/usr/usr/usr/usr/usr/.../filenametoolong?

R.