Re: 'apt-cache search' question

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003 10:46:46 -0500, Rick Pasotto <rick@niof.net> wrote:
> There was recently a question about which .deb added GIF capability to
> the gimp. Using 'apt-cache search gimp gif' did not return the correct
> answer. The man page for apt-cache says:
> 
> search search  performs  a  full  text  search on all available package
> 	  files for the regex pattern given. It searchs the package  names
> 	  and  the  descriptions for an occurance of the string and prints
> 	  out the package name and the short  description.
> 
> The problem seems to be that the word 'gimp' appears only in the package
> name and the word 'gif' appears only in the description.
> 
> Shouldn't the search treat the package name and the description as a
> single string? Doing so would have given the correct answer for the
> above query.

I assume you mean gimp1.2-nonfree (or gimp1.3-nonfree)?  I looked at
the source code for apt-cache search but it is not clear what it is
doing.

I agree with you that combined searching of the package name and the
description is desirable. I think you should report this as a bug
against apt. I did a search, and I don't see anything currently like
this in the bug database. In fact, there only seem to be a few (a
couple or so) bugs against apt-cache search.

If you don't want to file a bug I can do so. Let me know.

                                                      Faheem.