Re: Question about how "aptitude search" is used
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 07:34:47PM +0200, "Kim N. Lesmer" <knl@bitflop.com> was heard to say:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:13:30 -0700
> Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Daniel.
>
> > 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?
>
> I have always been annoyed with this exact problem, but I don't think
> the solution you think about implementing (doing like apt-cache) is the
> best way to go.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "like apt-cache". I'm thinking of
something a bit more ambitious than just extending the search to
descriptions; e.g., Enrico Zini has done some interesting work in this
area that I'd like to incorporate or emulate.
> From FreeBSD:
> $ make search name=foo
>
> Aptitude:
> $ aptitude search foo
This would be like
$ aptitude search '~nfoo'
, right?
> Anyway, just a thought.
Users can already build up arbitrarily [0] complex queries if they know
the aptitude search language. The question is, what should
"aptitude search blah" do if the user hasn't provided any context about
what sort of a search to do? I don't think that erroring out is the
right thing to do; I think there should be a "default" search mode.
The only reason this comes up as an issue is that the old default
happens to have a very precise meaning that could conceivably have been
useful in scripts that ask for, e.g., "linux-image-2\.6\..*" instead of
"~nlinux-image-2\.6\..*". If the default had been "search names and
descriptions" to start with, I wouldn't be so concerned, because that's
clearly an interactive feature and not useful for scripts.
Daniel
[0] for some values of arbitrary; the aptitude search language has not
grown general, or even primitive, recursion operators, and I don't
have any reason to expect that it will. Anything that complicated
should probably be done in a real programming language (e.g.,
python with python-apt) anyway.
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