[maemo-developers] metalayer-crawler - good idea?

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Frantisek Dufka wrote:
>> Search Maemo Bugzilla, there's some env variable which controls what
>> directories it searches.
> 
> Maybe automatic media scanning is not such great idea after all? Do you
> plan to have this optional and perhaps have some explicit method of
> invoking it preferably even on specific directory? Most often I know
> what exactly changed on my card and would pick specific directory for
> refresh.
>
> I think lowering metalayer-crawler priority is not a solution to the
> problem. Still you get flushed most of useful data from RAM just because
> you insert card (mostly with no change) and it takes some time anyway so
> when inserting the card and trying to play something immediatelly, you
> must wait. Also it seems to do lot of diskwrites. When rootfs is on mmc
> I can see frantic activity of mmcqd kernel deamon (doing writes?) for
> couple of minutes when booting or inserting the card (2 GB of mp3 files).

Crawler doesn't write to the MMC, it only reads it (it writes to sqlite
database in /home/user).  I think part of the badness is due to libid3.
You can see this with strace.


>> Without crawler you wouldn't see anything in the media player.
> 
> Yes, another bug :-) Would be nice to have this marvellous metadata idea
> optional. I keep my files structured and mostly I just want to play
> specific directory recursively (even with more levels). This simple (and
> maybe often used) use case seems to be not supported very well in
> current media player. The only way I found is to open one directory in
> filemanager and mark all files and select open.

Ditto.  I personally liked the 770 player more.


> I will try to search bugzilla and add this opinion somewhere when it is
> up again but I guess this could be first discussed here too since maybe
> the whole idea need some thoughts?


	- Eero