beagle's workings are not transparent enough

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: beagle

Right now it's impossible to tell much about what beagle is doing and how well it's working. (OK, it could be just very not-obvious, or I have a brain bug.)

I couldn't find out with any certainty:

(1) Exactly what is it indexing. The config window has an option to index home and a list of folders I can ask it to index, and that's it. However, I know for sure it indexes applications and some documentation files. I'd like to know exactly what else it's doing, and perhaps to config it. (For example, I may have documentation lying in some other folder than /usr/share/docs or whatever it's using.) Is it indexing chat logs? mail? gmail? firefox cache/bookmarks? It needs a way to see this easily (other than 'beagle-info').

(2) Exactly how much it has indexed. I installed it a week ago and this morning it still claimed it was working. And BTW, I clicked on the "don't show this anymore", and now I have no way of knowing if it's done or not except guessing from "ps -A |grep beagle". I'd like to know how much it indexed, a rough estimate of how much it still has to work, how big the index is (and where it is), perhaps how much work it actually did (processor time? words-in-index count?) and how well it went (MB/s?).

(3) Exactly how is it indexing. Is it using extended attributes? Is it using inotify? I notice it can stop indexing when on battery power. If inotify works, I'd like to have the option of stopping _crawling_ on battery power, but not re-indexing of changed files.

I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant, I'm just not good enough with English to make it more like constructive criticism :)

And yes, I realize this might need forwarding upstream. However, for beagle's creators these are wishlist items, while for Ubuntu they're bugs, because Ubuntu cares about usability more than most other projects.

Somewhat unrelated and probably too soon, but I'd also like a system that manages indexing-plugins and integrates with the package manager.

[Kevin Kubasik (kkubasik)]

While we won't ever set up a gui for this, you can watch beagle either by starting it in the command line with the foreground and debug switches (like so:
beagled --fg --debug)

or you can use the tool beagle-status to keep an eye on beagles progress and what its indexing.

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

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.