Re: 'apt-cache search' question #2

[Bill Webster <bwebster@burgoyne.com>]

On Fri, 2003-04-18 at 01:06, Rob Weir wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 06:11:49PM -0700, Bill Webster wrote:
> > This is not related to the original question but the other question
> > reminded me about my question :-)
> > 
> > A month or two ago I noticed a strange behavior with apt-cache search,
> > first I noticed that it can return results for packages which can not be
> > installed (no package available to install) and it can do the oposite of
> > not showing any information about a package that is available for
> > installation. I know next to nothing about the internals of apt and so I
> > am only guessing as to what the problem might be. If I were to guess
> > apt-cache uses so form of a database that it searches and that database
> > do not alwas reflect the current state of the debian packages on the
> > debian package site. Is this normal behavior or is this actually a bug
> > in the system? Or is anyone even aware of this problem?
> 
> apt-cache uses the same database as apt-get.  It's as recent as your
> last 'apt-get update'.
> 
> > I also noticed something else which I have not been able to explain. In
> > the process of exporing the above issues I commented out all of the
> > lines in the sources.list file and performed an 'apt-get update'. I
> > expected all apt-cache searches to be unable to find any packages but
> > there seemed to be a core list that is coded into apt-cache. Has anyone
> > else noticed this? Or is there an explanation for this behavior? This
> > appears to me to be odd behavior if apt is supposed to get it's list of
> > source packages from the sources.list file.
> 
> That's very odd.  You're sure you commented out every single apt source?

Here's what I did:
1) Emptied the sources.list file (0 length file)
2) ran 'apt-get update'
3) ran 'apt-cache search ".*"'

I get a list of 774 packages???