Bug#489204: gnome-inform7: search sometimes consumes all available time and space

[Norman Ramsey]

Package: gnome-inform7
Version: 5T18-ubuntu1
Severity: normal

I'm not able to reproduce this bug with any consistency, but I'll say
on at least 20% of attempts to type a term in the search window, Gnome
Inform 7 goes flat out allocating memory.  It consumes 99% of CPU, and
its resident memory starts growing.  When resident memory reaches 1.5GB 
my machine starts thrashing and I have to kill the process.

Two years ago I wrote a standalone KWIC indexer for Inform 7
documentation.  I have just tested it, and while it is a bit of a
blunt instrument, it still works.  Building the index (of documentation
only, not examples) takes 17 seconds; a query takes less than half a
second.  The index could be part of the package or could be built at
installation time in a postrm script.

There are some flaws in my indexer:
  * It is a command-line, text-mode script.
  * It does not handle phrases; if you ask for 'if we are'
    it simply returns all the results from searches for 'if', 'we', 
    and 'are'.
I could easily fix the phrase problem, and I would be delighted to be
able to contribute something useful to the Inform 7 project.  But I am
no gtk expert and so would need to work with someone else to produce
something that could be integrated into the GUI.


Norman


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gnome-inform7 depends on:
ii  libart-2.0-2           2.3.20-2          Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0            1.22.0-1          The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0           2.22.0-1          Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0         2.22.0-1          The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6                  2.7-10            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2              1.6.4-1+b1        The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.1-2           simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.76-1            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libfreetype6           2.3.5-1+lenny1    FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgconf2-4            2.22.0-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0            1:2.6.2-1         library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.16.3-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome2-0            2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0      2.20.1.1-1        A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomeui-0           2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0         1:2.22.0-3        GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgtk2.0-0            2.12.9-3          The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libgtkhtml3.14-19      3.18.2-1          HTML rendering/editing library - r
ii  libgtksourceview2.0-0  2.2.1-1           shared libraries for the GTK+ synt
ii  libgtkspell0           2.0.13-1          a spell-checking addon for GTK's T
ii  libice6                2:1.0.4-1         X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libjpeg62              6b-14             The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  liborbit2              1:2.14.13-0.1     libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libossp-uuid15         1.5.1-1.1+b1      OSSP uuid ISO-C and C++ - shared l
ii  libpango1.0-0          1.20.2-2          Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0             1.2.27-1          PNG library - runtime
ii  libpopt0               1.14-3            lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libsdl-mixer1.2        1.2.8-4           mixer library for Simple DirectMed
ii  libsdl1.2debian        1.2.13-2          Simple DirectMedia Layer
ii  libsm6                 2:1.0.3-2         X11 Session Management library
ii  libxml2                2.6.32.dfsg-2     GNOME XML library
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime

gnome-inform7 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information