Can't Remove Scrollkeeper without trashing Gnome

I can confirm this on gutsy (and basically any Debian-based distribution I used in the last 5 years), and I can't remember a single time where I used scrollkeeper or its database (I use the help system so seldom that a slower on-demand indexing would suffice). The only effect I see is a cronjob sometimes eating cpu and I/O, and 20MB used under /var.

Ciao

Martin

Just FYI, in Hardy Alpha 4 the scrollkeeper-update accumulates 10 minutes of CPU time on my 1GHz system. Die.

I can confirm this on gutsy as well. Have the exact same as originally posted by Alistair Ireland.

I strongly support this issue.
This damn thing just eats resources, energy, ... and the only "nice" way to disable it is either hacking or removing it's binaries and/or cronjob.

"Better" way (still not recommended):
sudo dpkg --force-all --remove scrollkeeper --purge

A reasonably nice way to disable: edit /etc/scrollkeeper.conf

Change from
------------------------------------
OMF_DIR=/usr/share/omf
------------------------------------
to a non-existant path
-------------------------------------------
OMF_DIR=/usr/share/omf/NONE
-------------------------------------------

Nice workaround (I edited my config file right away), but the real fix would be to remove the dependency on scrollkeeper for all packages.
This is actually what the maintainers of scrollkeeper recommend. From README.Debian: "You should NOT depend on scrollkeeper."

(At least) these packages violate this wish:
martin@garrett:~$ apt-cache rdepends scrollkeeper | grep -v rarian
scrollkeeper
Reverse Depends:
  nautilus-data
  gnome-system-monitor
  gnome-panel-data
  capplets-data
  xubuntu-desktop
  xpenguins-applet
  ubuntustudio-desktop
  terminatorx
  stardict-common
  scribes
  lock-keys-applet
  grdesktop
  gramps
  gnotime
  gnome-device-manager
  gnome-devel-docs
  gnome-devel
 |gnome-core
  gnome-chess
  gnochm
  glunarclock
  galeon
  etherape
  conduit
  bless
  anjuta
  zenity
  ubuntu-docs
  ubuntu-desktop
  synaptic
  rhythmbox
  planner
  nautilus-data
  libscrollkeeper0
  gucharmap
  gthumb
  gobuntu-desktop
  gnome-utils
  gnome-user-guide
  gnome-terminal
  gnome-system-monitor
  gnome-panel-data
  gnome-applets-data
  gedit
  edubuntu-docs
  doc-base
  capplets-data
  bug-buddy

A nice visualization (needs graphviz and apt-rdepends):
apt-rdepends -r --dotty scrollkeeper | dot -Tps > scrollkeeper-rdeps.ps

google: scrollkeeper gnome-core
leads to:
http://fts.ifac.cnr.it/cgi-bin/dwww?type=file&location=/usr/share/doc/gnome-core/changelog.Debian.gz
----------------
gnome-core (1.4.0.6-4) unstable; urgency=low

  * All packages should depends on scrollkeeper (>= 0.3.5) (Closes: #139135)

 -- Christian Marillat <email address hidden> Wed, 20 Mar 2002 11:24:34 +0100

---------------------
which in turn points to
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=139135

This appears to be the point where "gnome-core depends on scrollkeeper"
starts in debian.
-----------------------------

Yes, looks like instead of changing the postinst scripts to make scrollkeeper optional, they just added the dependency. Ironically, today dh_scrollkeeper creates a correct test. From /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnome-utils.postinst:

# Automatically added by dh_scrollkeeper
if [ "$1" = "configure" ] && which scrollkeeper-update >/dev/null 2>&1; then
        scrollkeeper-update -q >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
# End automatically added section

So the dependency could be dropped for all packages built with a sufficiently new debhelper.

Well I upgraded to Hardy, and apart from numerous other problems, there is still this with Scrollkeeper.

I didn't try the other fixes shown above yet but did delete the cron jobs from cron.weekly etc.

Interestingly, although the weekly cron job is gone, scrollkeeper is still running weekly, there are still log files in /var/log dated AFTER I deleted the cron files!!

Hallo, it's me again.

Eight months after I first registered this bug, I see the developers haven't even yet decided on the importance of it.

Well to put my half-pennies worth in, I think this is of fundamental importance.

Let's look at Stallmans four freedoms: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

and in particular Freedom Number One: "The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)."

Adapting it to my needs, in this case, involves removing it from cleanly from my computer, which I can't do. Freedom involves having the software running on my computer, which *I* decide, not you , not Ubuntu and not the scrollkeeper developers.

I simply don't want something running on my computer which

"stores metadata specified by the http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/omf/ (Open
Source Metadata Framework) as well as certain metadata extracted directly
from documents (such as the table of contents).

It provides various functionality pertaining to this metadata to help
browsers, such as sorting the registered documents or searching the
metadata for documents which satisfy a set of criteria."

@scrollkeeper_developers:

/tinfoilhaton

er ... that is *my* browser you're talking about there, isn't it? ... isn't it???

/tinfoilhatoff

OK, I´m not just trying to be funny here, I really am interested in finding out what the developers and other interested people think. To my mind, by Stallman's definition, Scrollkeeper is *not* Free Software.

In fact this philosophy seems to be running throughout Ubuntu and partially Debian and maybe other distributions too, it's not just scrollkeeper.

alistari, you are free to adapt it :) You can edit the dependencies of each package to not include scrollkeeper - maybe your patches will be accepted by the developers even. Or you can edit the scrollkeeper package to not run it by default.

Anyway, it seems like almost all packages use the dh_scrollkeeper hook, so the dependency should be dropped. See also http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2007/01/msg00047.html for a related discussion.

I think this is the way to go. Every package that currently depends on scrollkeeper needs an update like this one, basically just remove the "Depends" on scrollkeeper in debian/control.in.

I just heard scrollkeeper is deprecated in intrepid and replaced by "rarian". rarian provides a virtual package "scrollkeeper" and compatibility wrappers for the scrollkeeper commands. Don't know yet if it's better or worse...

Thanks, but in Intrepid scrollkeeper is now provided by rarian-compat and no longer installed. Mind testing it on intrepid?

What about those of us who do not want to upgrade to Intrepid?

I replaced scrollkeeper with rarian - not sure what the consequences are going to be - anybody tried it?

I also find this a pain. And very annoying that one can't remove it without removing huge parts of gnome.

Does anyone know what the status of this is now?
Will this package be included in Jaunty?

I just checked on my desktop, and it seems to be not included already in intrepid, nothing in the metapackage "ubuntu-desktop" depends on it directly or indirectly. I assume it is the same in jaunty.

scrollkeeper has been removed from the development release of Ubuntu and is not being maintained. Further bug fixing is extremely unlikely.

I noticed that gnome-terminal in karmic does not depend on scrollkeeper or anything similar.

not a fix as rarian is now used which cant be removed for the same reason as scrollkeeper used to be not removable

And you would want to do remove Rarian.... why? Rarian is not Scrollkeeper, nor does it suffer the ills that Scrollkeeper did.

See also bug 363695 for similar issues with xapian.

On my karmic system, I could not find any cronjobs or large databases related to librarian, so I do not consider it a problem. Scrollkeeper ate my CPU once a week, but librarian/rarian-compat is well-behaved in that matter so far.

regardless of behavior indexing is not *essential* to for instance gedit etc

you could be on a small (<2gb) SSD and not have the room for index's and not want the media thrashed

package dependencies should not be used to enforce system design but only when packages will absolutely not function without the dependency

Minutes ago I had to kill whatever was slowing me down to a crawl.

Scrollkeeper.

I don't want this. I don't need this. I don't want my system slowed down by something I don't want / need / use / asked for (and never will either)! I don't need to use a distro containing loads of crap added on that is not used and slows me down. For this very reason I use Xubuntu and not Ubuntu - minimal useless and never used crud added!

I hate, hate, hate slow computers - I JUST WANT TO DO MY WORK WITHOUT CURSING THE BLOODY PC!

Please get rid of scrollkeeper!

@casper: What Ubuntu version do you use? There is no scrollkeeper at all in Ubuntu 9.10, I don't assume it will return in the future.