Making beagle optional

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 5/16/07, Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> I subscribet to that bug, but for me on my 2 Fedora Core 6 systems
> beagle works flawlessly! And I use it all the time... not 100% cpu
> usage, no slowdowns... it "just works"tm :)

I'm glad it works for you, I mean.. it has to work for someone. I've
uninstall beagle  on my 4 personal machines running fc6 or fedora
development because it repeatedly decided to start thrashing disk and
cpu while i was trying to do "important" things.  If beagle was smart
enough to do whatever necessary system thrashing late at night or when
things were really idle, it would have escaped my scrutiny entirely.

>
> If this aproach would be the same with all components of Fedora I
> personaly have trouble with then there would be an empty application
> menue if you would remove all apps that have some little bugs.

100% cpu utilization of a background process isn't a little bug.
Beagle is acting essentially a daemon process, initiated as part of
desktop session startup. The indexer which is the underlying problem
is not even really a desktop application in the traditional sense. You
don't manually start it, you don't interact with it while its doing
its job. We don't even get a little cute tray icon that pops up when
the indexer is active for us to monitor or interact with.  It runs on
its own and as such its a pain in the ass to keep an eye on if its
going wonky. if you aren't running a system monitor like application
constantly you aren't necessarily going to notice when it decides to
flip out and burn your cpu for 10 minutes while the other running
processess suffer. I however do run a system monitor like application
constantly, and pay close attention to when the cpu spikes.

> For me this is an ovekill - there are much worst apps in Fedora 7 and
> aren't being removed from Fedora 7.

Yes, we all have our pet applications and applications with love to
hate. Shall I wax eloquent about how desperately vital I find inkscape
or revelation as applications that I simply can not live without on a
day-to-day basis? Or how much I absolutely loath gaim/pidgon?

Just because I find certain applications supremely useful (or
dishearteningly unusable), does not mean I'm going to stand up on a
soapbox, shake my fist in the air, and demand those applications to be
in or out of a default install target simply on the strength of my
personal preferences.

Beagle is still available in the repository. Is it really that
burdensome for you to install beagle from the repository instead of
having in the default media spin? And the answer is, its no less
burdensome for you to install it as it is for me to uninstall it after
the fact...which I have gladly done up till this point without
complaint.

But I think you need to appreciate the bigger picture that release-eng
and QA have to take in...there are competing demands on default
install targets..they need to be featureful as well as having robust
system performance. There is a need to make sure general perception
concerning Fedora's performance is not unduly impacted by misbehaving
background processes.  There is most definitely a elevated risk to
overall system performance in the Fedora desktop if beagle is enabled.
Whether or not your personal data doesn't cause beagle to misfire is
immaterial to the larger issue.  Beagle is not just one buggy
application that crashes unexpectedly while its being used resulting
sharp bursts of user frustration. When beagle running as a background
process craps out, its causing a noticeable degradation on the whole
system (especially low-end to middle of the road systems), with
absolutely no user-visible feedback at all to indicate to an
unsuspecting user that beagle is causing the system slowdown.   That's
a userbase wide issue, which deserves release-eng and QA
consideration.

-jef"so which indexer should i write a netcdf indexer for first... i'm
thinking medusa"spaleta