Hiding library packages from apt searches by default? (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)
On 01/05/2017 02:06 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Riku Voipio (2017-01-05 12:53:16)
>> Vast majority of users would only install this via dependencies. It's
>> hardly a node-specific problem that debian package searches output
>> large amount of packages that are not useful unless you happen to be a
>> programmer.
>
> ...and I agree that the issue is not specific to node-* packages, but I
> find it is quite common there. Quite likely due to recent inclusion of
> lots of packages, prepared semi-automated - as Philip pointed out very
> well.
Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default? I
think most users don't care about libraries in any language (be it
Perl, C, JS, Python, ...), but only care about software they
use directly. And developers that do care about libraries could pass
a flag to APT to say "yeah, please show me all packages that match
this". And maybe even indicated how many library packages were not
shown in the default search results?
Regards,
Christian
PS: I'm throwing this idea in as a general idea, I don't think this
is something for Stretch though, we're far too late in the release
cycle for that.
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