Comment 3 for bug 1303072

Symlinks (symbolic links, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symlink) are special files that have no content and point to other files. With symlink support enabled, Basenji tries to resolve those links to their target files by
1) storing all scanned files in a in-memory lookup table during scanning
2) storing all symlinks in an array in memory during scanning
3) doing the actual symlink -> targetfile lookup and database storage *after* scanning completed successfully.

It's important to note that the more symlinks your scanned media contains the longer step 3) needs to complete. Unfortunately there is no progress indication for this step. So it's very likely that your DVDs contain a lot of symlinks and Basenji appears to be stalling while it actually resolves and stores all the symlinks. It's also possible (but not that likely) that Basenji runs out of memory while filling the in-memory lookup table during scanning . You can verify that easily by monitoring Basenji's memory usage in your system monitor application.

If you disable symlink support, Basenji simply skips all symlinks, i.e. they won't be included in your index database.