[Lubuntu] Recoll not a good fit as a replacement for Catfish (or LXFind)

[Stephen Smally]

Il 11/09/2012 16:28, John Hupp ha scritto:
>
> I am starting a new thread here since the discussion veered in a new
> direction from the original topic (which was "LXFinder installed instead
> of LXFind").
>
> I successfully installed Recoll on Lubuntu, read most of the manual, and
> had some exchange with the developer (Jean-Francois Dockes), who is
> active.  The Recoll home page is at http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/.
>
> My take: This is a content search program that will also accomplish
> much-less-ambitious file name search.  The program has a sophisticated
> design, is very flexible, and very well documented in English and French.
>
> Apart from the Qt-based GUI, there is command line support, a KDE KIO
> slave interface, and a programming interface.  (So if the developers of
> Catfish or LXFind were so inclined, their currently
> file-name-search-only tools could be extended to content search, all
> through a single interface.)
>
> The program has native support for several MIME types that commonly
> store readable content, and there are filters for most of the other
> common readable-content MIME types.
>
> However impressive the program is, however, it would seem not to be a
> good candidate to replace Catfish as the recommended GUI search tool for
> Lubuntu.  The dev notes that it is Qt based, which seems out of step
> with Lubuntu's aims for lightness.  The database index that powers such
> impressive results is also very large -- depending on the mix of content
> that it is indexing, the database can be 15-65% the size of the original
> content (see http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/perfs.html). Memory
> usage during indexing can peak at 65 to a couple hundred MB.  File-name
> indexing is also not its strongest suit.  And it is tuned by default for
> searching the home directory rather than the entire file system (though
> with some configuration, it would seem to be possible to have it do full
> content searching in the home directory and more modest searching of
> file names and attributes in the file system at large).
>
> So for the moment, I would be content if Catfish could find its way
> through its error-handling bug (which I have been posting about under
> the topic: "Catfish search result: Fatal error, search was aborted").
>
> On 9/8/2012 12:59 PM, Karl Anliot wrote:
>> John, I "don't have time" to test catfish, but if catfish doesn't work.
>> Please test this out, and post your results!!
>>
>> http://danaleeling.blogspot.com/2012/09/lubuntu-1204-desktop-search-is-recoll.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:04 PM, John Hupp<lubuntu at prpcompany.com>  wrote:
>>> In the Lubuntu documentation, Catfish is the currently recommended GUI
>>> search tool.  But it notes "Though as of time of writing, LXFind is in the
>>> Lubuntu PPA and is forthcoming shortly."
>>>
>>> Elsewhere in a few slim references it seems to be expected for 12.10.
>>>
>>> But again, among the few references, a number of users find that the
>>> prescribed installation installs LXFinder instead of LXFind, and LXFinder
>>> does not work.  And that is what I found.  I set LXFinder searching for a
>>> known-existing file, and it did not find it, but did generate a slew of
>>> "permission denied" errors.  I'll add that the LXFinder shortcut does indeed
>>> point to /user/bin/lxfind, so this is not a simple matter of a
>>> mis-constructed shortcut.
>>>
>>> My installation commands:
>>>      sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-desktop/ppa
>>>      sudo apt-get update
>>>      sudo apt-get install -y lxfind
>>>
>>> One thing I notice about the documentation statement, though, is that it
>>> refers to the Lubuntu PPA rather than the lubuntu-desktop PPA which I used
>>> in my installation.
>>>
>>> Did I use an obsolete PPA, or is there another good explanation here (or
>>> even a bad but accurate explanation)?
>>>
>>> I'll also observe here that I regard GUI file search as a necessary part of
>>> the software stack.  It seems like something that's just gotta work on a
>>> modern O/S.  And I'm testing LXFind because I found that Catfish generates a
>>> disturbing error result when it can't find a match.  (Posted in a separate
>>> thread.)
>>>
>>> --
>>> Lubuntu-users mailing list
>>> Lubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
>>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lubuntu-users
>>>
>
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The point here is that we should focus on lightweightness. Recoll use a 
qt4 gui (i don't hate qt4, but we have to keep in mind that lxde is a 
gtk+ environment, and add qt4 dependencies will increase the iso size), 
and is heavily about find files when other search tools can't (zip 
files, for one). Lubuntu should ship a simple search tool (which should 
be ideally integrated within the file manager), my attempt to do this 
with lxfind failed, because i haven't much time to develop it.
The new version of catfish seems better looking, but i haven't tried it 
yet, so i can't speak about it.

Just my two cents.

Stephen Smally