click apps in Home scope disappear on flaky network connections

[Michael Zanetti]

Every once in a while all my apps disappear from the Apps scope.

There's only 9 apps left (the ones that are also shown in the home scope). All the others are gone. Also the "More Suggestions" category is missing in that state.

This state sometimes only results in a flickering of the scope and apps return imediately, but sometimes I have to wait up to a minute or two until my apps appear again.

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

I guess you have no easy way of reproducing this, no?

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

hmm, not really. I think switching between network connections increases the changes of this happening.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

What I think must be happening is that the click scope has no connection to the interwebs, and fails, in some way, to deliver any results beyond those basic ones.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Yeah. same here. However, it's not just about not having a connection. Intentionally disconnecting the device makes just "More suggestions" go away (which is correct) but already installed apps are still around. This must be something like loosing the connection in the middle of an update or the like, which messes up with the state so that even installed apps disappear.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[dobey (dobey)]

How does one force this to happen? It is working fine on my Nexus 7.

[Alejandro J. Cura (alecu)]

> How does one force this to happen?

Sergio mentions in bug #1268009 a way to trigger this behavior:

"It can be easily reproduced while on wifi by changing the nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf to some non dns servers address"

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

It fails easily on flaky networks, network timeouts.
I was reproduced fine for me when changing the DNS settings.

If you really don't have a connection, everything works fine; the problem seems to be tying the uninstalled app logic with the ones that are installed.

Can we change the title reflect that the installed click apps are the ones that dissappear?

[dobey (dobey)]

@Sergio, if you can easily reproduce this issue, can you ensure G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all is set in the environment, and attach the resulting ~/.cache/unity-scope-click.log file here, when this happens?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

I tried to get the debug output by adding the env var to the unity8.conf for upstart
I deleted the existing unity-scope-click log file but it was never recreated after I set up the test.

This is easy to reproduce by setting nameserver 10.0.0.0 in /etc/resolv.conf and rebooting.

The symptom is when you first expand the installed apps you see only the first 9. After around 10-20 secs the rest of the apps appear, then 10 secs later it goes back to just 9, etc.

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

On 22/01/14 19:16, Pat McGowan wrote:
> I tried to get the debug output by adding the env var to the unity8.conf for upstart
> I deleted the existing unity-scope-click log file but it was never recreated after I set up the test.
>
> This is easy to reproduce by setting nameserver 10.0.0.0 in
> /etc/resolv.conf and rebooting.
>
> The symptom is when you first expand the installed apps you see only the
> first 9. After around 10-20 secs the rest of the apps appear, then 10
> secs later it goes back to just 9, etc.
>

This may be a similar symptom as seen on the emulator; nothing from the
click scope is shown until you perform a search.

My original bug comment was to not tie the apps available on the store
to the apps installed to avoid the network dependency (success or fail)
which introduces a wait of comparable timing when compared to the legacy
apps.

[dobey (dobey)]

@Sergio, the listing of installed apps has no dependency on the network being available or talking to the server working. The timeout that deals with the network not being ready for available apps, is only set up and used by the network-using code. However, the Unity API for invalidating results does not have any fine grained control, so it will invalidate all results for the apps scope. This means that when the timeout is hit, a search for installed and available apps will recur. The installed apps should continue to be there. They might flicker (go away and come back), due to the way Unity works, but they should definitely not be going away and not re-appearing.

I was staring at the code for quite some time and trying to figure out how the situation described in this bug was even possible, and I see no way it can happen, from within the scope itself. I can only guess that something in libunity or the dash itself, is not properly re-displaying the results.

However, a full log with the debug info is needed to help determine that.

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

So it might be working, just super slow http://paste.ubuntu.com/6810683/

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

Video displaying the flicker:
http://ubuntuone.com/0Nv91Gr3cmT1RsohQJw9sq

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

I'd say i fixed this with http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~unity-team/unity8/trunk/revision/666 Has anyone been able to reproduce it after it?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

The symptom is still the same on build 188 from Feb 17

This is very easy to reproduce using comment #10

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

I kept my device with data roaming at the previous sprint; launching apps has been expensive ;-)

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Can you guys still reproduce this now that new-scopes have landed?

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Looks good to me now.

[Dave Morley (davmor2)]

So from what I can tell all the installed apps now remain visible in the installed section.

However the also available section has a long list of name but no icons. Not sure if this is expected or if it is an issue.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Ok. So ever since I've set up a WiFi hotspot here (which requires to log in through a website in the browser) I can reliably reproduce this here on image 250. That is, all the click apps are gone and do not appear until I log into the website.

With the same hotspot connection, the new-scopes (image 269) do not show this problem => Putting to fix released

@Dave: Yes, icons can't be fetched when the network connection breaks down. There is work in planned to cache them.

[Dave Morley (davmor2)]

I am happy to confirm this fixed then :)