Bug 320035

Summary: muon search doesn't list some package that ubuntu software center lists
Product: [Unmaintained] muon Reporter: Weng Xuetian <wengxt>
Component: muonAssignee: Jonathan Thomas <echidnaman>
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG    
Severity: normal CC: sergio.callegari
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 2.0.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Ubuntu   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Weng Xuetian 2013-05-20 04:20:00 UTC 
..personally I really care about fcitx (I'm developer of fcitx).
seems muon refuse to show some package without enough info, but I guess fcitx is not the only package suffered from this.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. search fcitx in muon

Actual Results:  
result shows nothing related to fcitx.

Expected Results:  
At least there should be some result like this list:
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/search/?q=fcitx
Comment 1 Sergio 2013-06-07 13:18:30 UTC 
On ubuntu 13.04 with kde 4.10.4, muon search lists nothing at all regardless of what it is searched. Looks like a fair treatment of all packages has been reached :-).

More seriously. I think that muon has (and also historically had) big issues in kubuntu. A typical problem is that whenever it needs some file and the file is only readable by root, it simply misbehaves, without providing any hint about the unreadable file.  I wonder if the problem is now the same.
Comment 2 Sergio 2013-06-07 13:28:55 UTC 
Indeed it is. Running as root, muon search works.
/var/lib/apt-xapian-index/ and its content are readable by anybody, though.
Comment 3 Sergio 2013-06-07 13:35:18 UTC 
/var/cache/apt-xapian-index/index.1/* MUST BE READABLE.
Comment 4 Jonathan Thomas 2013-06-07 13:43:12 UTC 
This seems to be more of an issue with the permissions on your filesystem, and not a bug with Muon.
Comment 5 Sergio 2013-06-07 14:10:23 UTC 
... that would immediately be solved if muon could put out a dialog with advice or at least a line on stdout about the files it needs and it cannot read rather than pretending that all is fine when it is not. My system now works, so I can avoid to care. But most users will not see the difference if it is a bug with ubuntu's permissions or in muon. If everything else works (apper, synaptic) and muon does not work, they will simply move elsewhere.

A final note: I do not really know if the original issue by Weng is the same as mine.
Comment 6 Jonathan Thomas 2013-06-07 14:12:21 UTC 
There's no way for Muon to tell if the Xapian database is empty or if it cannot be read. You'd need to file a bug report with Xapian about that I suppose.
Comment 7 Sergio 2013-06-07 14:29:34 UTC 
How about saying on stderr that the database "so and so" cannot provide any data? So one does not need to get a strace of muon and look for all the "EACCES" strings to find what and where "so and so" is?
Comment 8 Jonathan Thomas 2013-06-07 14:38:18 UTC 
The libxapian call we make throws exceptions when it can't open the database at all. LibQApt prints these exceptions to stderr, (prefixed with "search error:" so if libxapian thinks there's something wrong, we should already be able to see it. If not, then libxapian must be silently failing.