Now that KDE 4.7.3 has been released let me look back onto the work that I put into it over the last weeks.

I fixed four actual crashes in 4.7.3. On first glance this might not sound like much but these four crash fixes entail 38 duplicates.

I finally managed to close the memory leak in the file watcher service.

I significantly improved the file indexer:

Exclusion filters are now also correctly taken into account for folders.



.xsession-errors is now always excluded from indexing.



Rapidly changing files are only indexed once closed. This results in a lot less IO.



The previous change also results in torrent downloads being indexed after finished.



Files that are written over and over (like IRC logs for example) are only re-indexed once every five seconds.



Nepomuk now always extracts the plain text from PDF files via pdftotext. This is a hack to make sure that we can at least search all PDFs by content. The next step will be to extract meta-data like title and author via poppler. (This is required since the PDF analyzer in libstreamanalyzer/Strigi is not powerful enough yet.)



Symbolic links now have the correct mime type which means better search results.



In case the indexer gets stuck (runs forever on one file) it is killed after a period of time.



Jos van den Oever fixed a bunch of issues in libstreamanalyzer (Strigi) which results in less crashes and less endless PDF indexing. Stay tuned for Strigi 0.7.7.

With Soprano 2.7.3 Nepomuk will now restart the storage if Virtuoso goes down due to a crash or a third-party kill.

A running Virtuoso instance which was not shut down due to a crashed or killed Nepomuk will now gracefully be shut down before starting a new instance. This solves some startup issues.

A small query performance improvement based on a pointless UNION.

Smit Shah backported his patch which gets rid of the flickering Nepomuk indexer icon in the system tray. It now only becomes active if the indexer has been working for a certain period of time.

All in all 15 bugs are marked with “FIXED-IN: 4.7.3”. This does not include the fixes and improvements I made which did not have matching reports.

Today the next round of Nepomuk stability and performance begins. If all goes well KDE 4.7.4 should be rock-solid when it comes to Nepomuk. Thanks a lot for your continued support. I am still hopeful that I will find a more permanent solution soon:



