Thank you for your reply, Nathaniel. I'm glad it works for you too.
Could you please commit it (I have no write access).
email: ottwolt@gmail.com

Off Topic:
I'm very much interested in improving baloo et al. (I use it a lot). But that seems to be a somewhat deserted area. Am I wrong?

Yep, I can commit for you, but I'll wait until another Dolphin person or two (@elvisangelaccio?) weighs in first.

If you want to work on Baloo, that would be fantastic. It's currently maintainerless and bit-rotting, and in dire need of attention. The prior maintainer (and author) is Vinesh Handa <vhanda@kde.org>. If you get in touch with him, I'm sure he'd be happy to show you around the code and help you with your first patches.

If you read my comment here you'll propably doubt (as me) that'll be feasible.
Starting at point zero, really.

I have faith in you, Michael! I had also never written a line of C++ before becoming a KDE contributor, but people here are amazingly welcoming and generous with their time and skills, and you'll be hacking on Baloo in no time, no doubt!

I have faith in you, Michael!

Lol

I had also never written a line of C++ before becoming a KDE contributor

I thought I was a rare beast here. Good to see I'm not.

but people here are amazingly welcoming and generous with their time and skills

yep, already experienced it.

Thank you for your encouragement. I'm going to tackle baloo.

Stupendous. Let me know if you need a hand with anything, and do contact Vinesh. I'm sure he'd be happy to help jumpstart your efforts. Nobody likes to see their baby die. :-)

I've already submitted a patch for balooctl D9666 yesterday and added him as reviewer after your encouragement. That should suffice, does it?

Also I'm a little desorientated about this origin/master origin/Applications/17.12 branch merging thing for dolphin. Does that concern me in any way?

New features are commited to the master branch. It will be released with the Applications 18.04 Release. Bugfixes Go to the Applications/17.12 branch and will be released with the Applications 17.12.1 Release. So depending on whether you are developing a new feature or a Bugfix you need to checkout the appropriate branch

It's not your problem since you don't (yet) have commit rights. The person who landed your patch (@elvisangelaccio) should merge it to master, unless there's a good reason not to. @elvisangelaccio? Any reason to wait before merging to master?

Thanks for the Baloo patch D9666! I'm afraid @vhanda may not stop by for a review as he's no longer active in KDE development, but if you email him and explain that you're interested in doing some Baloo development, he may be willing to put some time into helping you get started and reviewing your patches, for a while at least (hopefully).

In D9664#186632, @ngraham wrote:

It's not your problem since you don't (yet) have commit rights. The person who landed your patch (@elvisangelaccio) should merge it to master, unless there's a good reason not to. @elvisangelaccio? Any reason to wait before merging to master?

I was actually waiting for @renatoo since there is a merge conflict in the places panel.

Ok I'll consolidate my ideas a little and present them to him.

For real now:
End of last year I started with

kdesrc-build --include-dependencies dolphin kate baloo kfilemetadata

to fetch and compile the code. That took 4 hours (make -j1) - it's an old machine
Two days later (I'm on tumbleweed) I made the "mistake" to do

zypper dup

which updated Qt and I had to go through the whole procedure (4h!) again.

There must be a way to isolate the building environment from the rest of the system.
But not only I want that. I also want to *use* the patched software. In case of my first dolphin patch linking the compile into /usr/local/bin was sufficient. But guess that was luck.
I did not find any KDE-specific doc on how to set things up in a sane way.
Is there? Otherwise would you please give some hints? Because I'm afraid things might get nasty when touching kfilemetadata.

What I personally do is use a KDE Neon VM for all my KDE development so as to avoid polluting my host system, but I do generally install to /usr (cmake _DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr <path to source> && make -jwhatever && sudo make install). To actually use the patched software for day-to-day use once I'm ready to test, I'll deploy to /opt/kde if I can.

FWIW, to make it easier for people to merge your patches, you might want to set your git identity appropriately so we don't have to manually change your name and email address:

git config --global user.email ottwolt@gmail.com
git config --global user.name 'Michael Heidelbach'

• done

committed D9698 before though.

Thanks for all these patches. At the rate you're going, you might consider applying for a developer account so you can commit them yourself!

I've landed this onto the Applications/17.12 branch, but I didn't merge it to master yet. That'll happen the next time someone performs the merge after resolving the outstanding merge conflict (@renatoo?).