Monterey migration indexing issues - MDQuery funkiness

[hars]

Just noticed you have a bug reporting forum, I posted this thread on the main one:

 

 

MacOS: 13.3.1 (a) (22E772610a)

Alfred: 5.1 - Build 2134

 

I spoke to the lovely Vero over email about this issue last year but was unfortunately unable to solve it. I revisited the problem, opened up a terminal emulator and bashed my head on the keyboard which surprisingly worked this time. 

 

Old dropbox Xattr attributes are to blame. Why it randomly happens (after renaming files for example) is going to be a mystery for the ages but I'm just glad Alfred is performing dutifully again. 

 

Not sure if this is an Alfred bug but it does look like a few other people have this issue so hope it helps.

 

[hars]

I thought I was so clever but alas, the problem only seems to be fixed on some files and not all. 

 

After much googling and mucking about, I think I am closer to the cause. It's something to do with the xattr attributes for sure, but perhaps not just the dropbox ones. 

 

Adding "com.apple.quarantine" makes the files/folders appear in Alfred immediately. Removing it afterwards leaves the file/folder working in search. Weird!

 

Edit:

 

Turns out just removing the attributes with:

xattr -c filename

 

Fixes the problem on any of the old files not just the dropbox ones. They're still there with metadata unchanged. 

 

Sorry for wasting your time if this has nothing to do with Alfred but hopefully it'll help troubleshooting!

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by hars

[Andrew]

Sorry for the slow reply on this, and thanks for documenting your findings. I've gone through much the same research to try and work around the underlying indexing issues, and have similar conclusions to you on this - Any fettling with xattr can make the underlying index update for that file.