[Bug]: Catalog items incorrectly showing as empty, requiring manual rescanning

Question

[Bug]: Catalog items incorrectly showing as empty, requiring manual rescanning

siracusa opened this issue 3 months ago · comments

Before submitting your bug report, please confirm you have completed the following steps

Searched the issue is not already listed in the Issue List (I've searched it)
Searched in the Quicksilver Users' Group for questions relating to tech support.
Downloaded the latest version of Quicksilver for your system and confirmed the issue still persists.

Bug description

For the past several months, Quicksilver sometimes decides not to scan many of the items in the Catalog. It usually manifests like this:

Log in to an account that has Quicksilver configured to launch on login.
Some time later, activate Quicksilver and type something (e.g., "Calc…") to try to launch an app.
Be surprised when Quicksilver does not offer a match for what you typed, even after you type out the whole thing ("Calculator") and hit the down arrow to look through all possible matches.
Open Quicksilver preferences and look in the Catalog tab. Notice that the Catalog items where you expected to find the desired app (e.g., items in the Applications section of the Catalog) have no numbers next to them, indicating that they have found no items.
Select each item in the Catalog and then click the "Rescan source" spinning-arrow button in the lower-right corner of the window. Notice that it suddenly finds many items, adding a number in a gray pill-shaped badge next to the Catalog item.
Repeat for every item in the Catalog that has no number-in-a-pill next to it.
Now, finally, Quicksilver can find the expected items.

I tried changing the "Rescan" setting to every possible choice ("Manually," "Every day," "Every 10 minutes," etc.) with no change in behavior.

I think sometimes it even reverts to having no items in many of its Catalog entries even after I've manually fixed it!

Needless to say, this is making Quicksilver quite frustrating to use.

Steps to reproduce

Log in to an account that has Quicksilver configured to launch on login.
Some time later, activate Quicksilver and type something (e.g., "Calc…") to try to launch an app.

Expected behavior

The desired app (e.g., Calculator) is found.

MacOS Version

macOS 14.5 (23F79) (But it has been happening for months on earlier versions of Sonoma.)

Quicksilver Version

2.4.2 (4041)

Relevant Plugins

No response

Crash Logs or Spindump

No response

Screenshots

No response

Additional info

No response

Nathan Henrie · Answer 1 · Thu May 30 2024 22:38:05 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thanks for the report -- there are other similar reports and this is a priority bug, I've just been tied up trying to sort out the crashes in QSProcessMonitor first.

Will try to hunt this down as soon as I can!

Nathan Henrie · Answer 2 · Sun Jun 09 2024 01:35:01 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm not currently able to reproduce this, either with a debug build from master or with the 2.4.2 release. All my catalog entries either have a pill with the expected number of entries (or at least the number remains the same after a manual rescan) or if they are missing a pill, there is still none after a rescan (suggesting it is truly empty).

It makes me wonder:

Could your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Catalog.plist have become corrupted somehow?
- Consider shutting down QS, renaming this file, restart, and see if behavior changes -- especially WRT catalog items that should be indexed by default (e.g. your example of Calculator.app)
Perhaps your catalog is not actually being scanned / rescanned for some reason?
- defaults read com.blacktree.Quicksilver QSCatalogRescanFrequency should give you some meaningful info to make sure the value is getting updated
  - The default of 10 minutes gives a missing value
  - Manually gives a -1
- If you run the Force Catalog Rescan action (via QS), does manually rescanning everything in this way pick up the missing items?

John Siracusa · Answer 3 · Sun Jun 09 2024 03:53:18 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'll try these fixes when I get back to my Mac, but I will note that I'm seeing this on two different user accounts on two different Macs.

Nathan Henrie · Answer 4 · Mon Jun 10 2024 19:51:09 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

configured to launch on login

I notice you specify this (twice) -- if you do not have it launch at login, but instead manually start QS, do you see the same behavior? Just curious.

John Siracusa · Answer 5 · Thu Jun 13 2024 22:22:45 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

OK, I'm finally back at my Mac. I removed my Catalog.plist file and the app created a new one, which I've populated. My com.blacktree.Quicksilver QSCatalogRescanFrequency is currently set to 1440. I'll let you know if I see the problem again.

John Siracusa · Answer 6 · Sat Jun 15 2024 00:14:24 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I just restarted my Mac, and I saw the problem again. This is after entirely deleting my Catalog.plist file, as noted above. Here's a screenshot of my catalog with missing numbers next to catalog items just after logging in.

I will now change Quicksilver to not launch on login to see if that has any effect.

punkhop · Answer 7 · Tue Jun 18 2024 09:31:26 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Same for me with #3006. Custom catalog requiring re-scan after each system reboot.

John Siracusa · Answer 8 · Thu Jun 20 2024 21:05:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Here's a recent crash log that seemingly happened during a catalog scan.
quicksilver-scanning-crash.txt

Nathan Henrie · Answer 9 · Fri Jun 21 2024 01:17:15 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@siracusa Interesting, thank you for the crash log. I assume that the whole of QS crashed (not just some kind of silent crash of a background thread)?

John Siracusa · Answer 10 · Fri Jun 21 2024 20:34:47 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Yes, Quicksilver was no longer running after that crash.

John Siracusa · Answer 11 · Sat Jun 22 2024 04:55:52 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Here's another crash that may or may not be related to the earlier one. As before, Quicksilver is no longer running after this crash.
quicksilver-crash-2.txt

John Siracusa · Answer 12 · Tue Jun 25 2024 03:46:21 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I will now change Quicksilver to not launch on login to see if that has any effect.

I manually launched Quicksilver shortly after logging in, and I saw the same bug: items in the Catalog with no numbers next to them. I had to manually scan them to get the expected items into the Catalog and available in Quicksilver.

punkhop · Answer 13 · Mon Jul 01 2024 06:42:28 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I installed the debug version. It's now crashing on startup half the time, and needing manual rescan the other half. How do I send the crashlog you need?

Nathan Henrie · Answer 14 · Mon Jul 01 2024 06:47:18 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Posting them in this thread would be great.

punkhop · Answer 15 · Mon Jul 01 2024 07:02:06 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Are these the right logs?
qslogs.zip

punkhop · Answer 16 · Mon Jul 01 2024 12:57:35 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Crashing every startup, and also asking for Accessibility every time, even though it has permission.

Nathan Henrie · Answer 17 · Tue Jul 02 2024 00:45:49 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

For the accessibility issue, you likely need to remove QS from accessibility permissions and then re-add it.

punkhop · Answer 18 · Thu Jul 11 2024 10:44:47 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Have done that a bunch of times.

Nathan Henrie · Answer 19 · Fri Jul 12 2024 05:52:00 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@punkhop -- I'm not sure why the debug version is crashing on startup. Based on those crash logs, it's a separate issue.

Would you please:

start a separate issue
attach those crash logs
Try starting Quicksilver from Terminal.app with the QSDebugStartup flag and post your results:

$ QSDebugStartup=1 /path/to/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver

punkhop · Answer 20 · Fri Jul 26 2024 07:39:53 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Any update on this, or the debug version crashing issue?