[ubuntu-mono] [Bug 80854] Re: beagle's workings are not transparent enough

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Why won't there ever be a GUI for this? I'm sure it's very confusing for an unexperienced user to see Beagle always indexing and not knowing why. I'm not really unexperienced and I'm still confused. I can never tell what Beagle is doing and why. For instance:
****************
$ beagle-shutdown 
$ ps -A |grep beagle
 6645 ?        00:00:23 beagled
 6908 ?        00:00:37 beagled-helper
 7214 ?        00:00:00 beagled-helper
13455 ?        00:00:02 beagle-search
22083 ?        00:00:01 beagled-helper
$ beagle-shutdown 
ERROR: The Beagle daemon does not appear to be running
$ sudo beagle-shutdown 
Password: ****
ERROR: The Beagle daemon does not appear to be running
$ ps -A |grep beagle
 6645 ?        00:00:23 beagled
 6908 ?        00:00:37 beagled-helper
 7214 ?        00:00:00 beagled-helper
13455 ?        00:00:02 beagle-search
22083 ?        00:00:01 beagled-helper
$ date
Wed Feb  7 11:34:12 CET 2007
$ date
Wed Feb  7 11:35:22 CET 2007
$ ps -A |grep beagle
 6645 ?        00:00:23 beagled
 6908 ?        00:00:37 beagled-helper
 7214 ?        00:00:00 beagled-helper
13455 ?        00:00:02 beagle-search
22083 ?        00:00:01 beagled-helper
$ beagle-index-info --help
Could not connect to the daemon.
$ beagle-index-info
Could not connect to the daemon.
$ beagle-info --status
Could not connect to the daemon.
$ ps -A |grep beagle
 6645 ?        00:00:23 beagled
 6908 ?        00:00:37 beagled-helper
 7214 ?        00:00:00 beagled-helper
13455 ?        00:00:02 beagle-search
22083 ?        00:00:01 beagled-helper
**************** 
I have no idea what's going on. The processes seem stuck, but they don't seem do be dead.

And what you propose is not a good answer to my questions. For example
(I may have expressed myself unclearly) I'd like to know what things it
can/tries to index (e.g. is it indexing chat logs?), not what is it
indexing right now. Sort of a list of active indexing plugins and what
they can do.

I can't really tell how much it has indexed either. I see it now -- two
weeks later after I installed it -- that it's still indexing files from
one of the partitions (a big one). But I have no idea if it indexed 95%
or 5%.

And for the third problem, that's not solved either by current tools. I
can see that some INotify messages when started in debug mode, so I
assume it tries to use it and it probably works. I also see some "file
attributes" warnings, so I assume that works too for files that didn't
throw a warning.  And then I see a flood of "Lock obtain timed out",
which I assume is from the program instances that won't quit. (See
above.)

I don't mean you should add a complete GUI for debugging Beagle, but
something of the kind Google Desktop provides shouldn't be out of the
question.

-- 
beagle's workings are not transparent enough
https://launchpad.net/bugs/80854