Re: Question about how "aptitude search" is used
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 07:13:30AM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> One of the things I'd like to implement in an upcoming aptitude
> release (probably post-lenny, likely next year) is a significant
> overhaul of the UI to the search engine; that is, how searches are
> entered and carried out from the interface.
It would be nice if there was a help screen in the curses UI that gave
the same info as the search strings section in the html docs, save
opening them up in lynx.
> In the current CLI, "aptitude search blah" searches for packages
> whose name contains "blah". In contrast, "apt-cache search blah"
> searches both package names and descriptions. What I'd really like to
> do is a full-text search with approximate matches on the whole package
> index that returns packages which might be relevant to "blah", with an
> option to sort the results by various relevance metrics. Of course,
> "aptitude search ?name(blah)" will always be available; this is just
> about changing the default behavior on bare strings.
I've never tried to do both at once before; I'm assuming that you put in
an "OR" operator, however why not just add a global function ~Z or
whatever that would search for the term as a keyword in any field?
> # Problem #
>
> The problem that I see is that aptitude's current behavior is
> predictable enough that people might be relying on it in home-grown
> scripts. Changing the semantics of a command underneath a script is
> impolite at best and will likely break things.
So enhance the script language rather than changing it.
>
> The alternative if I decide to maintain backwards-compatibility is
> to write a second command like "aptitude find" or "aptitude grok" or
> what-have-you, or to add some parameters to the "search" command
> (something like "--full-search"). In the first case, I get to answer
> user questions about the difference between "find" and "search" until
> the end of time, while in the second case, I get to answer user
> questions about how to search on more than just package names until the
> end of time.
If its fully documented, and especially if there is an adequate help
screen on search terms built-in, then just tell people to RTM.
> So, I'd really like to just change the default behavior of "search"
> when it's given a bare string. If I were designing the program up-front
> this is what I'd do, and I think it's the best end-point.
Well, then I'd change the way I work and people writing scripts whould
have to change them.
> # Question #
>
> How many readers of this list are using "aptitude search" as a
> subcommand in a script? Will you be impacted by this change? Will
> anyone else be adversely impacted despite not using it in a script?
As long as you add a command to allow a search just on name (unless its
there already a duplicate of no prefix), users like me will get used to
it.
The only search string I have in a script is my backup script which
generates a list of all installed packages not automatically installed
(i.e. manually installed packages). Off the top of my head its ~i!~M
but I could be wrong.
I don't suppose while you're re-writing aptiutde you can make it not hit
swap when I start the curses interface on my P-II with 64 MB ram (or
will Lenny and whatever comes next not run on 64MB anyway)?
Doug.
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