I hope this is the correct way to file such a bug. My reasons for filing this bugs are:
1. The beagle subsystem which should index documentation is broken. See bug #37742 and #39454 #39456.
2. Even if 1. is fixed yelp itself does not seem to handle beagle-searching very well as reported in bug #39451
2. Although beagle is only a runtime dependency there are major drawbacks in the yelp-case. There is currently no way of reverting to the builtin search engine if beagle is enabled. Thus the only option to obtain reasonable search-capabilities is to stop beagle. This is not satisfactory since beagle works quite well for certain use-cases, and thus should be runable without messing up yelp-search.
3. Nautilus have a similar approach of having beagle as a runtime dep. This is less severe since a) Beagle search in nautilus actually works quite well. b) Nautilus-type searches are file-searches which can be done without beagle using 'gnome-search-tool'.
On this basis I think that one should be able to run beagle, but that yelp should not be built with beagle support. Perhaps an option to enable it through gconf if possible. Otherwise it seems current support is so "hacky" in nature that those wanting to use it would also be able/willing to rebuild with beagle support if they want.
Thanks for your bug. We will have a look on that before dapper. Not a really issue anyway because beagle is not a part of the default installation