Does MacPorts depend on Spotlight?

Sriranga Veeraraghavan sriranga at berkeley.edu
Sat Nov 20 06:03:26 UTC 2021


According to the following Spotlight FAQ, Spotlight apparently doesn't index, among other things, “[f]iles whose invisible file-system attribute has been enabled” or "[f]iles within hidden or invisible folders”:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html <http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html>

Not sure if this is still true, but apparently it may have been true at some point.  The FAQ cites an Apple Knowledge Base article, but the article has changed and there isn’t (as far as I can tell) an affirmative statement the current version of that article to back up the statements in the FAQ.

> On Nov 19, 2021, at 21:19, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Nov 18, 2021, at 08:47, Eric Gallager wrote:
> 
>> Didn't MacPorts start doing `chflags hidden` on
>> /opt/local/var/macports at some point to stop Spotlight from indexing
>> it?
> 
> You appear to be correct, based on this commit message:
> 
> https://github.com/macports/macports-base/commit/cf42f8ab68e9ea8c6ded7ce2961d6829d73274d3
> 
> I did not realize / remember this.
> 
> I do not know if setting it to hidden actually causes Spotlight not to index it, just that the commit message claims it does.
> 

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