Re: Hiding library packages from apt searches by default? (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)
On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:32:45PM +0100, Christian Seiler wrote:
> 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?
After some thinking, instead of hiding better to group by:
$ apt search gif
[ GUI applicatoins ]
gimp
mirage
...
[ CLI applications ]
gif2png
gnuift
imagemagick
..
[ programming libraries ]
libgif
libsdl-image
python-pil
..
[ documentation ]
libgif-doc
...
$
I think the data for grouping can be theoretically mined from debtags.
Riku
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