I wanted to be able to use the file manager to get at everything, not just the stuff in my home or on the cards. So, I put in a symbolic link (please don't do this ):

cd MyDocs
ln -s / everything

However, eventually i rebooted the machine, and it became unbearably slow, even after reboot. Eventually, i ran 'top', and it said that metalayer-cralwer was using over 90% of the CPU. Probably wanted to use it all, but i was running 'top', right? Oh, and don't even talk to me about my crappy battery life. And i have two.

Some times, it was so unresponsive, that i'd click something, and it would be ten minutes before it actually did anything.

Removing the symbolic link, and rebooting, fixed the problem. Except, that i still want filemanager to be able to see the whole system. For now, i'll drop to an xterm and just do it, whatever it is. By the way, just removing the symbolic link is not enough. I also needed to reboot. And, the machine complained that some database was corrupt for a couple reboots. Presumably, metalayer-crawler had to rebuild it's database.

I recently reflashed, i'm now running osso-rx-44 20007-49-1

I thought this bug had to do with the roughly 7,000 new images, audio, etc., i'd just put on the machine. However, i looked up this bug with Google. Google can be really smart.

Bug 978
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978
talks about this bug.The bug report claims it's fixed.
And, Bug 1760 says it's fixed.
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1760
I'm sure some bugs were fixed, but, bug 1842 says it isn't.
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842
The real problem is that metalayer-crawler should not follow symbolic links. That means it's gotta do an lstat on each file, check to see if it's a symbolic link, and if it is, ignore it.

The 'scp' utility also needs to ignore symbolic links. I think the 'busybox' version of 'find' suffers from this. I'd really like to ditch 'busybox'. For example, 'xargs' also pisses me off.

Again, the work around is not to have symbolic links that create filesystem loops. For example, i have handy short links to the SD cards in my home directory. These don't create loops (or problems).

What, exactly, does metalayer-crawler do for me? It's supposed to put the location of media files into some database somewhere. What looks at it? If 'Media Player' does, it's news to me.

If i wanted to contribute to fixing some of these bugs, how do i get started?