[lug] Report on Kat

[Michael Hirsch]

I've been quite intrigued by reports of Kat. It is a new desktop search/DB
for KDE. It sounds great, and after reading about the new inotify kernel
service in Linux Journal I was excited to try it out. Since it comes
standard on Mandriva 2006 (that number does seem a little premature, doesn't
it?) it was easy to load it up and run it.

When I ran it in my home directory it kded started thrashing and a huge DB
was created, then kded would die after archiving only a few of my home dirs.
This, of course, would screw up the rest of kde, like storing and reading
cookies in my web browser.

I then logged in as my test user and ran it. KDE pegged the CPU for a few
minutes, then quited down. It did seem to get my whole home dir, thought
that is very small for this user, but it didn't seem to look inside the
files.

So I would say that it is not yet ready for prime time. It shows some
promise, but I don't think it is realized, yet. I'm surprised that Mandriva
would ship it in this state.

I'm also a little disturbed that Kat interacts with kded the way it does.
I'm not sure why it is kded that gets so busy rather than kat, but it ended
up crashing. Once kded is dead KDE is pretty hosed. It seems to me like KDE
needs to keep essential services like kded more isolated from applications
like Kat.

I've never been too clear on what kded is, but it is clearly quite
important.

I'd love to hear of others' experiences, or even some instructions on how to
set it up so it doesn't break things.

Michael
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