Strigi revisited

[O. Sinclair]

After some threads on Strigi I decided to invest some time on trying it 
out a bit more in depth. For starters: loads of bugs are filed on Strigi 
and most of them have been mentioned before here, others are not. 
However my conclusion is:
1. the developer(s) focus entirely on KDE4, KDE3 seems to be "let's 
leave as it is"
2. look for instructions/manual if you can, I have found nothing. The 
"wiki" does not exist. Neither any man pages

First I just tried to use it as is. Noticeable:
1. Preferences in the form av what folders you want to index can not be 
changed via the Konqi "gui". Only if you go to HOME/.strigi and edit 
daemon.conf will they change
2. all gui are odd - the "konqi" one and the qt one give no usable 
result, meaning I find lots of odd references inside files but can not 
open them? The applet searches on names and is a bit more useable - 
after you tweak Strigi a bit
3. It chews up all CPU you have even when the daemon is reported as "idling"

I did then try to install Kat (older search engine for KDE) and was told 
in a very nice installer that x number of "translators" needed to be 
installed. Did so and then Kat crashed nicely a number of times when I 
tried to actually use it. I gave up. However - AFTER that Strigi started 
to build massive indexes and suddenly found x number of file names from 
the applet (not the Konqi though, still useless results). Conclusion, 
guess: Strigi needs these translators but does not list them as 
dependencies or tell you anywhere that you should install them.

I got to around 6 Gb of index files and 100% CPU + weird results with 
using applet (other applets stopped working) before I decided it was/is 
enough. I will now remove all Strigi packages. It is time to try 
Kerry/Beagle or Google Desktop.

Note: most of these bugs are filed so I dont see the point of re-filing. 
I think KDE/Kubuntu has taken a very wrong decision here in making 
Strigi default desktop search.

Regards,
Sinclair