Bad coding practices in Fedora packages

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:06 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Tomasz Torcz <tomek at pipebreaker.pl> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 02:32:28PM +0100, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
>>> In my opinion, a "search tool and indexer", even if it brands itself
>>> "a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database", has no valid
>>> technical reasons to run on the machine all the time, even at times when
>>> nothing is using it, as was the case at the moment I took the above snapshot.
>>
>>  Well, indexer need to index files. And react to new files appearing. Which
>> brings in another wart of tracker - in default Fedora installation, it is set
>> to work "while other application are running, except for initial crawl". This
>> makes computer barely usable on second login, while tracker indexes gigabytes
>> of text files in my ~.  At least on rotating rust storage, SSD may be better.
>> And running in idle IO priority doesn't help much.
>>  Tracker should be set to run "only when computer is not being used". But then,
>> tracker-preferences is not installed by default.
>>
>>  Also, 30 GiB in .cache/tracker is a bit extreme when rest of my ~ is 4 GiB.
>
> I also discovered that three different tracker processes were running
> in my xfce desktop!  However since I don't see a need for them for me,
> nor do I want them, it was relatively easy to prevent them from
> executing on desktop startup by going to The Applications menu, then
> Settings->"Session and Startup" and under the "Application Autostart"
> tab then switch off "Tracker File System Miner", "Tracker Store" and
> "Tracker Miner for Flickr" as three separate switches - after that
> there are no tracker processes running after the next login.....  and
> if necessary the cache files can be removed as well.
>
> I guess there are analogous switches in KDE too that might help make
> KDE actually work as a much snappier desktop? In fact I abandonned KDE
> for xfce because it was simply too slow logging in for my liking. All
> this in f16 but others may have a different experience of course?
>
> If this makes KDE a usable desktop again I might even try it when I
> have a bit of spare time!

I think tracker can be turned off centrally for KDE and XFCE by going to

/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop

Find the line:
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;KDE;XFCE;

Remove the KDE and XFCE bits.

Similar for the other two tracker files in the same directory.
tracker-miner-flickr.desktop
tracker-miner-fs.desktop

The only catch is that if a system update rewrites those files then it
will sets them going again -

Is there a foolproof way to stop them running in any desktop other than gnome?

I wonder how many users actually want or need these?

-- 
mike c