Dear Maintainer,

I've installed Kali Linux (rolling release) and selected the KDE/Plasma
desktop.

There's an icon on the taskbar that indicates there are upates available.

Clicking on the icon pops up a window that says there's 12 updates
available, with a 'view updates' button.

Clicking on the button brings up plasma-discover, which starts off in
'Checking for updates...' mode, with 'Fetching...' in the title bar, and
'Fetching...' and 'Looking for updates' in the main pane, but it just
sits there doing nothing.

A few seconds after I close plasma-discover, a stream of 20+ "Searching
for file: Finished" desktop notifications pop up.

I've learned to not update the system using plasma-discover and instead
use 'apt-get dis-upgrade'.  :-)

Good luck!

I also encounter this bug on Debian Buster.

But I manually disabled all the AppStream and DEP-11 metadata from apt
configs, so this may be the reason.

Can anyone reproduce this on a clean system?

Hello,

I just tried to install fresh Debian Buster on a VM and tried to reproduce the
bug. It appears that Discover works fine on a clean install.

As I mentioned before, I am able to reproduce this with AppStream metadata
manually disabled in APT configs. So this may be the reason.

Please lower the severity.

severity 930168 important
tags 930168 moreinfo
thanks

Alexander Kernozhitsky - 12.06.19, 19:05:

Thanks, Alexander. Doesn’t happen here either on a highly customized
Debian Sid installation.

Lowering severity.

P D, thank you for your report. "renders package unusable" is not the
right severity if the package is just unusable for you. It is the right
severity if it makes the package unusable on most of all Debian
installations. This is certainly not the case here.

So please do not use a release critical bug severity if it is not
appropriate¹.

Also please note that Kali Linux is not Debian GNU/Linux. So please
retest any issue you have with Kali Linux with a pure Debian GNU/Linux
install before reporting it here.

So please retest with a pure Debian GNU/Linux installation. If you
cannot reproduce the issue there, I'd close it.

[1] https://release.debian.org/testing/rc_policy.txt

Thanks,

Martin Steigerwald - 12.06.19, 22:01:

If its reproducible on a Debian GNU/Linux installation even when it does
not happen all of the time, the bug will stay open of course.

In that case I kindly ask you to research upstream bug tracker for
similar issues. There has been a lot of bug fixes regarding discover
since version 5.14.5. So it would help if you could find the bug there if
its reported and if there is a fix for it, tell us about it. That way you
can help the understaffed Debian Qt/KDE team fix the bug by adding a patch
for the 5.14.5 version currently packaged in Debian.

I can confim the same behaviour on current Debian sid and I found a working
solution for me.

In the end it was an issue outside discover. appstream data update was
disabled, I proplery did that because the files are that big. I sill could
search apps via appstream, so I thought that is not the root issue.

$ appstreamcli search kate
Identifier: org.kde.kate.desktop [desktop-application]
[...]

So appstream was already installed and working.

Steps I needed to do to list apps within discover:
rename /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/#50appstream to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50appstream
apt update

That was all.

So for others it is a good idea to check:
* can I search apps vis appstream (  appstreamcli search kate )
* does the update command is successfull ( appstreamcli refresh --source=os);
or the command that is triggered by /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50appstream)
* is /var/cache/swcatalog populated and writeable

that at least should clearify the issue even more.

regards,

hefee