I recently upgrade to plasma 5.5 and noticed that baloo is required dependecy for gwenview and plasma-desktop.

I have no idea why a file indexing daemon would be required to display images, it makes no sense at all.

But then I noticed that everything works flawlessly with baloo disabled, so I wonder why it is a required dependency to be able to install plasma-desktop in the first place ?

Could it be made optional for those who would rather do without baloo the resource gobbler ? Akonadi being enough of a resource hog as is and disabling it is less of an option due to having actual adverse consequences on several kde applications.

I came here to ask the same question. Would anyone like to discuss this opening post please?

AFAICS on my system, gwenview only requires the baloo *library* (libKF5Baloo5), not baloo (the indexer) itself.
Same for plasma-desktop.

At least that's the case in openSUSE.
If your distribution specifies the package dependencies differently (or doesn't separate the lib from the actual indexer), you should take it up with them I suppose.

Background

kde-frameworks-devel & 'Scrap baloo?': https://marc.info/?t=147388868100002&r=1&w=2
kde-devel & 'Scrap Baloo Thread Feedback': https://marc.info/?t=147585407300006&r=1&w=2


plasma-workspace / Review board

Make KF5Baloo optional: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/128956/

Review Request #128956 - Created Sept. 20, 2016 and submitted 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Description
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-fram ... 37734.html

Regardless of the current state of Baloo, it is not very deeply tied into Plasma. Usage in plasma-workspace comes down to providing the baloo runner.

Rog131 wrote:Background

kde-frameworks-devel & 'Scrap baloo?': https://marc.info/?t=147388868100002&r=1&w=2
kde-devel & 'Scrap Baloo Thread Feedback': https://marc.info/?t=147585407300006&r=1&w=2


plasma-workspace / Review board

Make KF5Baloo optional: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/128956/

Review Request #128956 - Created Sept. 20, 2016 and submitted 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Description
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-fram ... 37734.html

Regardless of the current state of Baloo, it is not very deeply tied into Plasma. Usage in plasma-workspace comes down to providing the baloo runner.

Regardless of all of this, as pointed out before, a dependency on a *library* does not automatically put loads on the system. The difference is whether the daemon is working or not, and few kB more on the system can be ignored.

tosky wrote:Regardless of all of this, as pointed out before, a dependency on a *library* does not automatically put loads on the system.

Yes.
And while building gwenview and plasma-desktop without baloo is possible, that would mean that some additional (optional) features would be missing, even if you would decide to install and use baloo.

In the end that's up to decide for your distribution how they want to build it, or to you if you build the software yourself.

As mentioned, in openSUSE baloo is nicely split up, and I can even uninstall baloo5-file (i.e. the actual indexer), or decide to not even install it in the first place, here without problems if I choosed to.

Thank you all. The query stemmed from my removing the following packages after a full install of Slackware 14.2:

baloo
baloo-widgets
nepomuk-core
nepomuk-widgets
shared-desktop-ontologies

one of those contains libbaloofiles, hence my query here regarding the dependency as a requirement for gwenview rather than a compile option. I'll put the packages back for the time being while I think about things.

I'm not here to discuss 2010 issues about indexing desktops - I don't even know how that was resolved by KDE. I was just puzzled about the reason for gwenview's dependency on what seems an indexing function.

John Harris wrote:Thank you all. The query stemmed from my removing the following packages after a full install of Slackware 14.2:

baloo
baloo-widgets
nepomuk-core
nepomuk-widgets
shared-desktop-ontologies

nepomuk is not used at all since 4.13, as baloo replaced it.
So you should definitely be able to remove nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets, maybe also shared-desktop-ontologies.

baloo-widgets is mainly the file metadata information panel that's used by dolphin, e.g., it's actually independent from Baloo (but uses the index if available).

one of those contains libbaloofiles, hence my query here regarding the dependency as a requirement for gwenview rather than a compile option. I'll put the packages back for the time being while I think about things.

Well, as mentioned, gwenview *can* be built without Baloo support, but then the functionality is missing completely (and cannot be restored by just installing baloo).
This mainly means the functions to tag/rate files and add comments I think.

But, gwenview does not need baloo (the indexer) on runtime even if built with baloo support.

And plasma-desktop needs baloo for the included baloo search krunner.
Again, not a runtime dependency, unless you want to use that runner (it will of course only find files indexed by baloo).