Re: Understanding aptitude search patterns

[Panayiotis Karabassis <panayk@gmail.com>]

On 10/04/2011 05:45 PM, Javier Barroso wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Panayiotis Karabassis <panayk@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
> I propose you sending a patch with that detailed documentation to
> aptitude-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org (or like a wishlist in PTS)
> 
> Regards,

I'd have to write it first, haha.

-- 
Best regards,
    Panayiotis Karabassis