Looking at the changeset, it now does a connection check at start-up of CKAN. If it fails then CKAN runs but doesn't show any
packages, apart from via the Tags interface, and the search page and widget on the front-page are removed. (BTW Is this a
useful thing to do? Without search, perhaps CKAN should simply not start?)
When discussing the ticket we agreed that we should allow ckan to start without search. It is possible that people simply want to list/view information without searching for it and we decided not to prevent them from doing so.