beagle should replace search tool if installed

Thanks for your bug. That was planned, I've a patch (from the fedora package) on my disk for that

This upload fixes the issue:

 gnome-panel (2.14.1-0ubuntu1) dapper; urgency=low
 .
   * New upstream version:
     Panel:
     - Don't show an empty label for local URI that are not file: URI in
       the bookmarks (Ubuntu: #31956, #36775)
     - Plug leaks
     - Always canonicalize URIs in launchers before showing them
     - Cleanups
     libpanel-applet:
     - Plug GnomeProgram leak
     Clock Applet:
     - Remove GnomeProgram leak
     - Fix potential crash
     - Fix potential crash with unknown event types
     - Launch evolution on the clicked day
     - Plug leak of a GError
     Show Desktop Applet:
     - Use less padding for the focus so the icon doesn't get trimmed
     Misc:
     - Use po/LINGUAS to list languages
     Docs Translators:
     - Maxim Dziumanenko (uk)
     Translators:
     - Vital Khilko (be)
     - Jérémy Le Floc'h (br)
     - Pema Geyleg (dz)
     - Ivar Smolin (et)
     - Benoît Dejean (fr)
     - Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl)
     - Yuval Tanny (he)
     - Luca Ferretti (it)
     - Takeshi AIHANA (ja)
     - Vladimer Sichinava (ka)
     - Wouter Bolsterlee (nl)
     - Gora Mohanty (or)
     - Dan Damian (ro)
   * debian/patches/07_clock_applet_spawn_evo_right_day.patch:
     - fixed with the new version
   * debian/patches/07_use_beagle.patch:
     - use beagle for the places menu search item if available (Ubuntu: #38986)

I think it was a bad idea to remap “Search” on the Places menu with beagle-search.

Simply, how do we access the file finding tool now??

It's not about superiority -I like beagle- but they have entirely different use cases. Only insane people let beagle index / recursively considering that memory and cpu usage are immense. Also, beagle doesn't index all files; g-s-t can be forced to look inside of all files; g-s-t is nifty in that it collates the results of slocate and the find utility, which is much more powerful than beagle is. How do you search for files of more than 50 Mo, with the owner of xxx et cetera pp. Just look at the available criteria in g-s-t. The loss is amazing.

There are numerous ways to access beagle already. I know of beagle-search on the app-menu, deskbar-applet, F12 and the nautilus integrated search. Gnome-search-tool was lost entirely. I don't think beagle-search is adequate as the function that represents “Search” in the Places menu.

towolf:
- beagle is not installed by default
- if you don't want to use it don't install it
- you can always run gnome-search-tool, it's installed
- if you think the beagle search is not good enough you can open bugs on beagle
- suse and fedora does the same change

To summarize I'm not going to revert that change if you decide to install beagle that's to use it, other way don't install it

Sebastien,

I understand why the change seems to make sense: Beagle seems to be an upgrade to a simple file finder - or an improved version.

I argued that it is not. How, for instance, do you find all files on your system that are named xmodmap? Do I have to index my whole hard disk? How do I find files bigger than 50 Mo when my hard disk space runs out?

In summary, a file finder is not the same as a desktop indexer. I know how to use find at a console, I also know how to call g-s-t from a console - plus, I like having beagle indexing my pdf files et cetera. It's not about me it's about Linus Torvalds - resolving this bug removed functionality from the GUI.

what do you think than updatedb does if that's not index your disk? Why couldn't beagle do that too?

$ sudo du -h /var/lib/slocate/slocate.db
4,4M /var/lib/slocate/slocate.db
$ du -sh ~/.beagle
290M /home/towolf/.beagle***

***only my $home is indexed, with many excluded dirs, i.e. only data created by me is in the index, not assorted source files e.g.

Recently, I watched beagle a little, and noticed ~/.beagle was 2.3 Go. I don't think that was normal, but hey, beagle is new and not fully developed.

Maybe I was not clear. Is there a reason for beagle to not make a simple disk indexation too (updatedb like) for that usecase? It would allow to have the beagle magic and no feature regression neither

You were, I were. The reason is that it will take a humongous amount of memory, disk space and CPU to index the whole disk, which will create a full text index of files whose content with 98% likelihood I will never be interested in. Beagle « magic » works only for the file name for almost all system files, for the content there have to be filters for every file type (I wish there'd be a latex filter for example). As for feature regression there is nothing beagle can do for use cases that can be accessed with what you can see in the screenshot /except/ “file name” and “full-text” for very specific mime types.

I mean g-s-t doesn't even have a .desktop file...

For all I care let this sink in for a while. There will be new bugs opened about this, I'm sure.

Maybe my previous was still not clear, but why couldn't the beagle search have a basic mode like gnome-search-tools too? I doesn't need to index everything the way it does at the moment, it could have an extra feature using locate and find (what gnome-system-tools does)...

I've created a bug-report about to request the same behavior for tracker-search-tool, since tracker is now being shipped by default on Gutsy.

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+bug/131964

// Off-Topic -- Reply to Sebastien //

Sebastien.. i think i actually saw a search tool exactly like you describe. It's called catfish. See:

  http://software.twotoasts.de/?page=catfish

It's in the universe repository. It supports multiple search back-ends: find, (s)locate, beagle & tracker.
Perhaps that package too, should replace the search-for-files entry in the places menu when installed.

Maybe these choices need to dealt with like other alternatives (such as default browser, email, java-vm, etc.).