Bug 446167

Summary:	Searching immediately upon opening Discover returns worse search results compared to if you wait a few seconds before searching
Product:	[Applications] Discover	Reporter:	Nate Graham <nate>
Component:	discover	Assignee:	Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen <leinir>
Status:	VERIFIED UPSTREAM
Severity:	normal	CC:	aleixpol, giuseppebelluzzi95
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	master
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Nate Graham 2021-11-27 18:51:55 UTC

Everything from git master today.


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open Discover
2. *immediately* search for "OBS"


OBSERVED RESULT
A bunch of weird random search results and not the OBS app


EXPECTED RESULT
The OBS app

If I wait about 5 seconds before searching, OBS will appear as the top search result as expected. But evidently the appstream backend wasn't fully initialized or something at the moment when I searched, so it gave me a bunch of garbage results. We should ensure that it's fully ready before you can search, and also try to make this happen faster.

Comment 1 Aleix Pol 2021-11-30 02:18:54 UTC

🤦
Can you try to narrow it down?

What backends do you have? Which is your default? Can you try it with different "plasma-discover --backends XXX" runs?

Comment 2 Nate Graham 2021-11-30 03:45:46 UTC

My default backend is flatpak.

When running with the packagekit backend only, a search for "obs" does shows the packagekit-provided app "OBS Studio" as the 18th result. This happens no matter how long I wait before searching. This may be an AppStream bug; `appstreamcli search obs` returns a uselessly long list as well, with "OBS Studio" in the middle despite its title containing the search term.

But when I run Discover with only the flatpak backend and search for "obs" immediately, it appears after a few seconds and it's the first item. If I wait a few seconds, it also appears as the first item. This is good. This is what I expect.

When I run discover with both backends, the problem happens as I originally reported it:
- Searching immediately shows OBS as the 18th entry (as with the packagekit-only search)
- Searching after 5 seconds shows OBS as the first entry (as with the flatpak-only search)

JFYI I tried out https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/213 but it didn't help.


This may also be relevant: OBS Studio is provided by both packagekit and flatpak on my setup, and they are de-duplicated, but the page for them in Discover shows no Source menu. When only the flatpak backend is active, I can see the flatpak version of the app. But when both the flatpak and packagekit backends are active, it always shows me the packagekit version, and I can't see the flatpak version.

Comment 3 Aleix Pol 2021-12-02 00:16:51 UTC

Based on our conversation on the conversation in #plasma-discover:kde.org I'd like to close this as a problem UPSTREAM, as the next libappstream version release fixes it.

The underlying problem is PackageKit search method (which is slightly different to Flatpak) is quite broken. Why that would affect you when Flatpak is your chosen method is something we could look into, but it's suddenly less of a priority.

Comment 4 Nate Graham 2021-12-02 00:18:38 UTC

So sorry, I mis-typed before: my default backend is PACKAGEKIT. Hopefully it makes more sense now.

I believe the separate pools vs shared pool issue that Matthias brought up in chat is probably an element of this as well, but yeah, if the new AppStream version fixes it, that's great. :)

Comment 5 Nate Graham 2021-12-02 21:58:24 UTC

*** Bug 446392 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6 Nate Graham 2022-04-08 18:46:59 UTC

Can confirm that 0.15.2 fixes it 👍