Re: apt-cache regex question

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:17:47 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

> On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:22:38 +0200, Πρεκατές Αλέξανδρος wrote:
> 
>> apt-cache --names-only  search  '^a'  except from packages name started
>> with 'a' (intented)  will also  give packages that they have a source
>> file whos name starts with 'a'. is that an error?
> 
> (...)
> 
> Hum... from man "apt-cache" page:
> 
> search regex [ regex ... ]
> search performs a full text search on all available package lists for
> the POSIX regex pattern given, see regex(7). *It searches the package
> names and the descriptions for an occurrence of the regular expression*
>       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> (...)
> 
> (bolded text is mine)
> 
> So, no, I think you are getting the documented behaviour ;-)

No, wait, the above argument has a big hole. Man page continues (I did 
not carefully read, my bad...):

***
If --full is given then output identical to show is produced for each 
matched package, and if --names-only is given then the long description 
is not searched, only the package name is.
***

So indeed, only package name should be queried in the regex which does 
not seem to be the case. I also get false positives, for example:

sm01@stt008:~$ apt-cache --names-only search "^a" | grep sleepd
sleepd - puts an inactive or low battery laptop to sleep

But here, even the source package is named "sleepd", why the regex is 
catching this? A bug? :-?

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón