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.