Bug 276338

Summary:	Implement full "slow search" to complement quick search
Product:	[Unmaintained] muon	Reporter:	Ivo Anjo <ivo>
Component:	muon	Assignee:	Jonathan Thomas <echidnaman>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	hugo.rito, stasnel, tomek-k
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	1.1.80
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Ivo Anjo 2011-06-23 17:08:52 UTC

Version:           1.1.80 (using KDE 4.6.4) 
OS:                Linux

Let me just start by saying thank you for your work on the muon suite.
With muon, I don't miss synaptic at all, except for one feature: the search.

With synaptic, you can search by name, and name+description. With muon, you can use the filter bar at the top to do something like that, but It never gives the results I expect.

For example, if I'm searching for the "linux-source" package, as I type:
l - nothing changes
li - most packages disappear, I only get 7 hits, none of them what I want
lin - 5 hits, none of them what I want
linu - many packages hit (hundreds?)
linux - only "linux" package matches
linux- - only "linux" package matches
linux-s - many packages hit (hundreds?)
linux-so - many packages hit (hundreds?)
linux-sou - finally linux-source shows up without me having to hunt down the list, many packages hit (hundreds?), but other packages that start with linux-source aren't at the top
linux-sour - finally linux-source-2.6.38 is at the top below linux-source, many packages hit (hundreds?)
linux-sourc - exactly the same as the previous one
linux-source - linux-source-2.6.38 gets bumped down to 4th place, many packages hit (hundreds?)

If I further continue drilling down to linux-source-2.6.38
linux-source- - linux-source is at 2nd place again, many packages hit (hundreds?)
linux-source-2 - linux-source disappears, linux-source-2.6.38 is bumped to 7th place, some other packages hit (dozens?)
linux-source-2. - linux-source-2.6.38 disappears from the results
linux-source-2.6 - 12 gits, linux-source-2.6.38 is at second place
linux-source-2.6. - 4 hits, linux-source-2.6.38 disappears

I could go on, but my point is: this is totally unexpected for me. Even as I am drilling down with more and more specific naming, I still get lots and lots of hits, some of them don't seem to have anything to do with what I want (maybe they have suggests: or depends:?), and sometimes what I do want disappears from the listing.

Would it be possible to fix this, or if this is the desired behavior, to add a more advanced search mechanism, that at least allows to select only name for searching? I think this is even more important now that kpackagekit won't be present by default on Kubuntu, and hope my bug report is still in time for next release.

Thanks again for your work.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Jonathan Thomas 2011-06-24 14:19:05 UTC

The plan currently is to at some point offer an advanced search dialog to complement the current search. (The current is more of a "Quick Search", like the search in Synaptic's toolbar)

Comment 2 Jonathan Thomas 2011-06-24 14:21:07 UTC

Oh, and I should note that this probably won't happen for 1.2, but perhaps for 1.3. I tried to implement this once using threading, but ran in to some issues due to the apt libraries not being thread-safe. I'll have to come up with some way to do a full search without freezing the GUI.

Comment 3 Ivo Anjo 2011-06-24 17:59:48 UTC

Thanks for your answer.

Now that I think about it, I've tried synaptic's quick search once or twice, had weird results, took mental note, and never used it again (and promptly forgot about the why or what). My test search for linux-source with synaptic's quick search seems to behave very similarly to how muon works.

If I may suggest, it seems to me that when I select "All Categories", I already get a list of all packages in the system, and a small blurb about them. Scrolling in this list seems lightning-fast on my netbook, so obviously it seems to fit snugly in memory, and is processed pretty quickly. So my suggestion is: what if by default the filter bar just works based on the package name + small blurb, and a simple dialog is added that triggers the old search as a kind of advanced mode?

I'm afraid that novice users that need to install some advanced package that's not on the software manager (for example freshmen CS students or something), they might get confused when they search for the package: especially the part about very relevant results disappearing and then re-appearing is very strange, because users might start to type what they want, get an empty window, and give up.

I guess it's my own opinion and I can only express it and ask, but I think that would be a better solution for the default mode, even if later other advanced search modes are added -- it also doesn't seem that it would suffer from the threading issue.

Comment 4 Hugo Rito 2011-10-18 13:56:31 UTC

Having just transitioned from suse to kubuntu, I find muon very user friendly and fast. Yet, I agree with the reporter that the search needs some tweaking.

In particular, I found very confusing that something as simple as changing a letter between consecutive searches would lead to completely different results.

Comment 5 Tomasz Kaźmierczak 2013-07-22 12:36:30 UTC

Hi. Don't want it to seem like a rant, but...

Version 1.3 was released long time ago. The current version is 2.0, and the search functionality (which I would argue is one of the most important features in a package manager) in Muon is still very impaired and annoying (apart from the lack of "search packages by name only", there are some other problems, already reported here somewhere).

It all makes working with Muon a very frustrating experience. Adding the possibility to search packages only by name would improve it a lot.

Comment 6 Christoph Cullmann 2024-09-23 18:22:02 UTC

Muon is no longer maintained, please switch no a supported alternative like https://apps.kde.org/discover/ or the package manager native no your system.

Sorry for the inconvenience.