..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
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.
Indeed it is. Running as root, muon search works. /var/lib/apt-xapian-index/ and its content are readable by anybody, though.
/var/cache/apt-xapian-index/index.1/* MUST BE READABLE.
This seems to be more of an issue with the permissions on your filesystem, and not a bug with Muon.
... 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.
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.
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?
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.