Can tracker extract be disabled in Gnome 46

Platform
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I want to keep tracker running, for quickly searching for file names, but I don’t need tracker extract indexing file contents.

In the past, up to Gnome 45, I could disable tracker-extract only with

systemctl --user mask tracker-extract-3.service

However, in Gnome 46 that service has gone, if I understand correctly.
So, tracker extract always runs and I can’t find a way to disable it.

Thanks in advance

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Yes the way tracker-extract is managed changed in Tracker 3.7 because there is greatly improved sandboxing of the extractor now, so it has to be managed in a special way. (You can read a bit of background about this here - On CVE-2023-43641 – Carlos Garnacho).

I don’t think we ever declared an “official supported” way to do this, however it seems a reasonable use case, and something we should probably think about more in context of indexing the full home directory (Be more encompassing about what get indexed (#336) · Issues · GNOME / LocalSearch · GitLab).

Can you open an issue against tracker-miners for a documented way to do this ?

In the meantime, i suspect if you do rm /usr/share/tracker3-miners/extract-rules/* you’ll find the extractor no longer processes anything. Let me know if it owrks.

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@sthursfield Thank you for the quick response!
I’ll try your suggestion ASAP.

In the meantime, I created this Allow for tracker-miner to be disabled without disabling tracker (#342) · Issues · GNOME / LocalSearch · GitLab

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I tried your solution.

After removing the contents from that directory and logging out/logging in, I can still see the tracker extract process in execution:

/usr/lib/tracker-extract-3 --socket-fd 3

but I guess it won’t do anything.

However, the journal now generates an entry of this shape each time I change something (e.g., create, modify, remove) in one of the directories indexed by tracker:

tracker-miner-fs-3[1950]: (tracker-extract-3:1950): GLib-GIO-WARNING **: 16:25:34.669: Error creating IO channel for /proc/self/mountinfo: Invalid argument (g-io-error-quark, 13)

By my tests on a VM with snapshots, that entry is generated anyway in such a situation, even when the extract-rules directory is filled with its original contents.

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See:

Fixed in glib, should be included 2.80.1 release.

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Right! I forgot to mention I’m on Arch. Thanks! :slight_smile:

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