Re: Understanding aptitude search patterns

[Panayiotis Karabassis <panayk@gmail.com>]

I still have much to learn about aptitude, but in case anyone is
interested, I made some sense from the source code, which seem to be
ingenious at times:

There are indeed two modes, but not what I thought. There is a "match
all versions" mode, which seems to be used by ?all-versions() and a
"match any version" which seems to be used by everything else. What the
latter returns (all versions or just the versions that matched), I do
not know.

The really clever part is how ?any-version() works. Matches happen
against a pool of package versions. So ?any-version creates a *new pool*
for each package version in the original pool. Then it concatenates the
matches together. That way it forces a package search to become a
version search. Think about it. Amazing. I am a better programmer for
finding this gem.

The documentation could be more detailed though.

-- 
Best regards,
    Panayiotis Karabassis