Disabling baloo, gentoo-way

Paper, which describes how to remove the dependency on baloo in your system.

Disclaimer

I do not use this patch, since I prefer less destructive methods. However, apparently all works fine, because there is no any claims. Since this patch was created in a few minutes, it removes all baloo’s calls from source files (maybe I’ll create a normal patch sometime).

On other hand, I highly recommend to people, who do not use baloo for some reason, disable it from the settings menu (it was added it 4.13.1) or read this article.

Introduction

In Archlinux gwenview and kdepim (and baloo-widgets) depend on baloo currently (2014-05-18). In the version 4.13.0 kactivities depends on baloo too (and I don’t know why); but this dependency was not required explicitly, so it was enough just to rebuild the package by removing baloo from the list of dependencies.

gwenview

It’s all quite simple. Developers have taken care of the wishes of ordinary users and added a special flag:

//Semantic info backend for Gwenview (Baloo/Fake/None)
GWENVIEW_SEMANTICINFO_BACKEND:STRING=Baloo

Thus, we add requred cmake flag to the build script:

cmake ../gwenview-${pkgver} \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DKDE4_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
    -DGWENVIEW_SEMANTICINFO_BACKEND=None

kdepim

Since everything was done in a hurry, I prefer to look at the source code using grep and to find all references to baloo. Needed strings (they are links to ballo in CMakeLists.txt, baloo’s function calls and header declarations) were commented (I added some fake calls to the source code). You may find the patch here (4.13.3). Download the patch, apply it to the source code and recompile kdepim.

Packages

All Archlinux packages for both architectures may be found in my repository.