https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397255
Bug ID: 397255
Summary: Baloo crashes at a gust of wind and has horrible error
handling.
Product: frameworks-baloo
Version: 5.48.0
Platform: Slackware Packages
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: crash
Priority: NOR
Component: Baloo File Daemon
Assignee: baloo-bugs-n...@kde.org
Reporter: popro...@gmail.com
Target Milestone: ---
It's difficult for me to really report this issue as a singular crash within
Baloo. After suffering so many random crashes that are unrecoverable unless the
index is deleted and rebuilt from scratch, I have decided to report this as a
singular bug.
Baloo crashes often, for a variety of reasons, and has very poor error
handling.
The primary issue is *not* the mere fact that Baloo crashes. Almost all
programs are bound to crash from time to time. The issue is, Baloo fails
silently and seems to have virtually no recovery mechanism whatsoever.
On 5.47.0 about two weeks ago, my database at ~/.local/share/baloo/index became
corrupt, which resulted in baloo leaking memory until my 8 GB of RAM were all
eaten up, and the kernel had to kill it with OOM killer.
On 5.48.0, everything was working swimmingly for about a week and a half. Then,
I printed an email from Seamonkey Mail to PDF. Baloo's attempt to index this
file inexplicably caused Baloo to crash, and my index again became corrupt.
This time, thankfully, there is no memory leak, but even after logging out,
killing baloo_file (which had to be done manually since the process was still
running after logout [see, eg, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391253]),
removing ~/.local/share/baloo/index-lock, removing the offending file, and
restarting Plasma5, baloo has now become extremely crashy and unstable.
Now, introducing any file into $HOME causes a crash. Even running "touch foo"
in my $HOME causes a crash.
At any rate, these issues sound very, very difficult to debug. Just pointing
your browser to https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=baloo is extremely
overwhelming. Rather than trying to bandage these bugs one by one, would it not
make more sense to build more user-friendly error handling into Baloo? Is it
absolutely impossible to repair a baloo database without doing a full rebuild?
Perhaps upon crash due to a corrupt DB, baloo could auto-repair itself?
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