Re: Apt: Searching for "Provides: ..."

[Nathan E Norman <nnorman@incanus.net>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 08:46:31AM +0100, Thomas Guettler wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I want to search for all packages which provide xserver.
> 
>   apt-cache search 'Provides.*xserver.*'
> 
> This should find xserver-s3, but it doesn't.
> 
> Any hints?

I'm no apt-cache expert, but my reading of the man page suggests that
'apt-cache search' searches "package names and the descriptions" for
the provided regex.  Unfortunately, it seems it does not search the
full control information for each package (too bad; I like your idea).
I'm not aware of a tool that does what you want.

When I run 

 apt-cache search 'Provides.*xserver.*'

I get 

 ttf-xtt-wadalab-gothic - Free Japanese TrueType fonts (gothic)
 ttf-xtt-watanabe-mincho - Free Japanese TrueType fonts (mincho)

as output; a look at the "Description" field shows that the word
"provides" and the word "xserver" do appear (apparently apt-cache
does regex searches case-insensitive).

-- 
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
  Just because an idea originated at "redhat" does not mean it is evil.
          -- Sean 'Shaleh' Perry