Issue 341: On Linux Mint, indexing gives failed message on first run & all subsequent ones

I am afraid that I am not going to provide more information than this, because (1) generating the log files seems a bit involved, (2) I spend too much time reporting Linux bugs, (3) since Mint is a popular distribution, you might be motivated to check whether other / vanilla Mint systems have the problem (Indexing failed reported in the GUI) that I had. For the moment, I am uninstalling Recoll.

My system: Mint 18.1 x64 Cinnamon. Kernel 4.8.0.39 EDIT: Recoll version 1.21.5 (installed from Mint’s repository) + Xapian 1.2.22 (version numbers as reported within the Recoll GUI).

I’ll help if you will. Deal?

Ok. Enabling the log is not hard.

Open the GUI, go to preferences- >Indexing configuration Enter stderr in Log file name, set the level to 6, exit the GUI.

Run indexing from a terminal as:

recollindex > /tmp/trace 2 >&1

Hopefully, the log should contain an explanation of your message (maybe send me the last few hundred lines if you can’t make sense of it).

I have put the log [here](http://pastebin.com/hpzfunDe). It is is not very long.

The log suggests, and testing confirms, that what was preventing the indexing from working was this: I had set Recoll’s index to use only 5% of my disk. Now (1) it would be good were the GUI to report this as the reason; (2) the error message in question, namely

stop indexing: file system 43% full > max 5%

leaves me unconvinced that the program is doing what it is supposed to. For it looks somewhat as if the program is going on how full the disk is, rather than on how much of the disk the index would use . .

The percentage refers to the disk occupation percentage, not the space taken by the recoll index. I think that this makes more sense because if your disk is at 99%, you probably don’t want recoll to try and use 5%.

This parameter is a very frequent source of problems. I think that it is right to use the global disk occupation, not the size used by the index, and that the manual is clear about what it means: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/webhelp/docs/RCL.INSTALL.CONFIG.RECOLLCONF.STORE.html

But the GUI is not doing a good job of making things clear. I’m quite disposed to change both the label and the tooltip, if you have an idea about how to make this clearer.

Aha. Also, I confess that I did not check the manual.

Here are my suggestions for wording.

I think that it would be clearest to change it to, Free space requirement - but then one would have to invert the value. (For a max disk occupation value of 40% would correspond to a free space requirement of 60%.) So perhaps it it is best to leave the text as it is is, but change to the tooltip - to the following. This is the percentage of disk usage - total disk usage, not index size - at which indexing will fail and stop. The default value of 0 removes any limit. at or beyond this degree

Also, and obviously enough: make the indexing failed error message more informative, please.

clarify the disk usage limit parameter GUI tooltip. Closes issue #341

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clarify the disk usage limit parameter GUI tooltip. Closes issue #341

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