On 9/17/23 15:06, Wols Lists wrote:
On 17/09/2023 19:37, Michael wrote:
However, unlike locate, baloo is meant to index not just file names,
but also
metadata tags and relationships relevant to files, emails and
contacts. Its
devs would argue it has a small footprint. So it is meant to
be*more* than a
simple file name indexer.
But what is the POINT of said index? If there's no point it's just a
total and complete waste of time and space!
So, far the only point I'm aware of is it is supposed to make kmail
run faster - an application I've never used.
While I've also always had KDE indexing turned off, baloo and associated
"stuff" allows searching through all your files (or a configurable
subset) not just mail. It lets you find something you know you have but
forgot where you stashed it. Also, I'm pretty sure that that high load
is only until baloo finishes one complete pass through all the files
it's been told to (or allowed to) index. After that, it only needs to
index new or changed stuff. I also believe there is a way to limit how
much cpu it uses, but I have no idea how, since I (like you and many
others) prefer to limit it to 0.
You would probably get a better discussion, including at least some
reasonable defense of baloo, posting on discuss.kde.org (their current
forum system.) One recent example I did see there is that baloo (with
appropriate configuration) can let you see height and width of image
files in dolphin (the file manager.) No, I don't have any need for that
either, but I can see some users liking it.
One thing to keep in mind, I don't think folks like us (Gentoo users in
general) are really the primary target of KDE. I suspect they are
(among other things) trying to produce a system that will attract users
from "that other OS" who may take things like poor performance but full
indexing for granted.
Jack
