[Bug 642652] [NEW] Strigi uses an uncontrollable, monotonically growing, amount of space that cannot be reclaimed

[sergio.callegari]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: kdebase

The actual bug is "that cannot be reclaimed".

Scenario.  Multiuser system.  Each user has a kde desktop. Strigi is
enabled by default with (IMHO) very silly defaults about what to index.
Result: after a few months, each user has a > 3GB space wasted with the
strigi indexing information. Either the machine comes low with disk
space in home and nobody cannot work anymore, or users come low with
disk space wrt their quotas and most of them cannot work anymore.  Users
start complaining since they cannot understand why they are low on disk,
since given the actual things they had put in their home, all of them
think that they should have a few GB left.

You tell them that it is the indexer. They tell you that they do not use
it.  You tell them that maybe they do not use it, but still it is
working. They ask you why you do not disable it by default.  You tell
them that there is no documentation saying how to create users' skeleton
environments with strigi disabled. They tell you "ok, I gonna disable it
from my system settings". Finally most of them do so (either by
disabling strigi completely or by telling strigi to index only much more
selected stuff).

For the remaining users you need to find out on your own where the
strigi configuration file is to disable it from there.  Otherwise, there
is no way for "root" to run "systemsetting" to configure the environment
of one of his users without knowing the user password and logging in to
the kde environment as the user, which seems a rather intrusive thing to
do.

Ok, finally you have strigi disabled for everybody.  What is the result?
Absolutely nothing.  When you tell strigi either not to index files at
all (or not to index directory XXX), the space used for indexing (or at
least for indexing directory XXX)  is not reclaimed at all.

You go on google, and the hint is to kill the whole nepomuk database for
each user.  It is quite lucky that most  users had never ever used
nepomuk tags and ontologies at all. Otherwise they would get quite upset
at seeing them wiped away.

Please... given that nepomuk had already costed european taxpayers over
11.500.000 EUR (15 M$), make a little extra effort to have a little
"reclaim space" or "clean database" button, as databases that
monotonically increase in space are not exactly nice.

In the meantime, please kubuntu, let strigi be disabled for all users as
a sane default.  Users who know what it is for will also know how to
enable it and how to deal with its quirks.

** Affects: kdebase (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Strigi uses an uncontrollable, monotonically growing, amount of space that cannot be reclaimed
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/642652
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