Re: Question about how "aptitude search" is used
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 05:55:58PM +0200, Jochen Schulz <ml@well-adjusted.de> was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows:
> > 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.
>
> I like the full-text search idea, but I dislike the idea of approximate
> matches (without it being a different command or a parameter). It makes
> search results less predictable and hurts cases where your search terms
> yield many results anyway.
I think that depends on how approximate it is and how the results are
ranked. Obviously this will take a lot of tuning; my main point is that
I want to implement the most useful string-based search I can, and
that's not going to just search names. :-)
> Another aspect you should consider is speed. Aptitude is already quite
> slow and memory intensive. In my opinion, you should refrain from making
> it even more unsuitable for low-end devices than it already is. It's
> Debian's preferred package manager, after all.
Well, this won't impact anything other than "search", and it may
actually make things faster (I'll probably use an index on the package
cache, and I may even adjust the search interpreter to support some more
efficient modes of operation...)
Daniel
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