Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 6:24 am Post subject: NeoLight from Patch 4 not working for me
I'm not having any success at all with NeoLight as installed by patch 4 - it wasn't deposited in my /Library or ~/Library and no indexing has occurred (at least my test searches haven't identified a single NeoJ document). I did install one of the earlier versions of NeoLight (1.0.1 IIRC) but didn't manage to test it out - would this be interfering with the patch 4 installation and if so what should I do to correct it?
If I look in the NeoOfficeJ package contents there is a NeoOfficeJ/Contents/Library/Spotlight/neolight.mdimporter file (version 1.0.3 from the Get Info window) - can I simply move this to the MDImporter folder in my /Library folder? _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
You shouldn't need to move the plugin. Instead, you probably need to force Mac OS X to recognize the new NeoLight plugin. Do so by executing the following command:
Sorry, but do I copy paste that entire phrase into Terminal and execute it, or do I need to add anything else to it... my knowledge of Unix is relatively limited?
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 5:37 am Post subject:
Weird, my reply didn't get submitted... anyway here it is again:
I had to use the sudo command to get it to work and now documents that I have edited since updating to patch 4 are being found by Spotlight searches. Unfortunately, any that haven't been opened/edited since that update are not. I guess that my Spotlight md database needs to be re-indexed or would a restart do?
Cheers,
Jonathan _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:10 am Post subject:
If you want to reindex documents that exist on your hard drive prior to the update you'll need to force Spotlight to reindex all of the documents that are supported by the plugin:
That's all one line...copy it into a Terminal and execute it. Note that it will cause Spotlight to reindex all files, so your computer may experience some heavy load for a while depending on how many OOo documents are on your computer.
The standalone plugin is performing this reindexing step...perhaps we should do it in the NeoJ installer as well. Personally, it seems like a performance issue with Spotlight. I'd think that when the metadata server detects that a new plugin is available it should automatically go adn reindex all of the files of that plugin's supported UTI types. It seems funny that Spotlight does not do that reindexing automatically.
I'd think that when the metadata server detects that a new plugin is available it should automatically go adn reindex all of the files of that plugin's supported UTI types. It seems funny that Spotlight does not do that reindexing automatically.
Maybe in the "rush" to get 10.4 out the door, Apple decided it would just be better to have plugin installers run the aforementioned command, and polishing the metadata server would be something to add for 10.4.5
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 8:15 am Post subject:
OPENSTEP wrote:
If you want to reindex documents that exist on your hard drive prior to the update you'll need to force Spotlight to reindex all of the documents that are supported by the plugin:
That's all one line...copy it into a Terminal and execute it. Note that it will cause Spotlight to reindex all files, so your computer may experience some heavy load for a while depending on how many OOo documents are on your computer.
The standalone plugin is performing this reindexing step...perhaps we should do it in the NeoJ installer as well. Personally, it seems like a performance issue with Spotlight. I'd think that when the metadata server detects that a new plugin is available it should automatically go adn reindex all of the files of that plugin's supported UTI types. It seems funny that Spotlight does not do that reindexing automatically.
ed
Thanks ed, this has worked. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 10:49 pm Post subject:
(got back from 2nd time watching ROTS...I am a Lucas whore)
OK, if that seems to be the trick then I'll try to coordinate with Patrick to get that into the patch installers and only execute it on 10.4 systems...I think we should be able to check via a uname or test in postflight.
I'm still unsure of how spotlight would handle things upon upgrading to 10.4 from 10.3 and having NeoJ installed previously with the plugin. I'd expect that the NeoJ Spotlight plugin would be detected in the app bundle prior to the initial reindexing of hard drives post 10.4 install. It'd suck if that initial indexing is limited only to the default Apple-supplied plugins and we have to worry about redoing this junk each time.
In my mind the only time a plugin installation should have to trigger a reindexing is if something fundamental has changed in the metadata plugin itself that would cause all old information to become stale (e.g. a change in file format).
I'm still unsure of how spotlight would handle things upon upgrading to 10.4 from 10.3 and having NeoJ installed previously with the plugin. I'd expect that the NeoJ Spotlight plugin would be detected in the app bundle prior to the initial reindexing of hard drives post 10.4 install. It'd suck if that initial indexing is limited only to the default Apple-supplied plugins and we have to worry about redoing this junk each time.
In my mind the only time a plugin installation should have to trigger a reindexing is if something fundamental has changed in the metadata plugin itself that would cause all old information to become stale (e.g. a change in file format).
These two bits do seem to present something of a conundrum. On the one hand, you really don't want to trigger a reindex on every patch or release install (as I hear it, Spotlight indexing can take over your CPU for a while), but you certainly want to new installs on 10.4 to have that command run (test for existance of Neo/J receipt?).
And I'd certainly hope that Spotlight would recognize pre-installed plugins when a system goes from 10.3 to 10.4, but since none of the registration mechanisms existed (did they?) on 10.3, I'm not sure how it would know.
Anyway, I've been pondering these questions for the last couple of weeks as I read and hear things about Spotlight, and now seemed to be a good point to verbalize them (in fact, I expect to see the latter--"I have patch-4 installed and now I'm upgrading to 10.4; what do I need to do?"--as a support question sooner rather than later)....
Smokey
P.S. I take it ROTS really is that good? _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Anyway, I've been pondering these questions for the last couple of weeks as I read and hear things about Spotlight, and now seemed to be a good point to verbalize them (in fact, I expect to see the latter--"I have patch-4 installed and now I'm upgrading to 10.4; what do I need to do?"--as a support question sooner rather than later)....
But we haven't heard it yet . Maybe we'll get lucky.
sardisson wrote:
P.S. I take it ROTS really is that good?
Well, no it isn't, IMHO. It is more of a non-stop action flick than an adventure movie and the on-screen chemistry between Anakin and Padme is non-existant at best. I feel that Lucas overshot his target. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 6:53 pm Post subject:
Yeah, I know I haven't tried the procedure yet of installing a plugin within an application bundle on 10.3 then doing a 10.4 upgrade. I suppose I could do it on a partition if I get curious...
Worse comes to worse, the minimum that would need to be done after a 10.4 update would be to rerun that mdimport -r command from above. I definitely don't want to start triggering that on each patch. It took over two days to fully index all of my hard drives on my main box after a 10.4 update, and I have so many OOo formatted documents (I've been "eating my own dogfood" since 2000) that it would take a long time to reindex them all.
Compounding the Spotlight indexing time is the damned OOo/OpenDocument format itself.
It's compressed.
In order to parse it, it has to be uncompressed and, on top of that, parsed by an XML parser. To uncompress it requires reading portions of the entire zip file into memory to uncompress it, including uncompressing the entire text content of the file in a separate process. This is definitely something that we want to try to avoid doing many times in succession if possible. For individual files when they're modified is one thing; to do thousands of files will require quite some time.
The OOo file format is quite unforgiving considering the "minimal file parsing" approach favored by Spotlight design recommendations.
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