Re: Number of Debian packages available.

[Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Andrei POPESCU
<andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Ma, 16 oct 12, 08:01:59, Tom H wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 6:58 AM, Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> According to my reading of the manual:
>>>
>>> aptitude search '~smain'
>>>  and
>>> aptitude search '~smain|~scontrib|~snon-free'
>>>
>>> should give you the answers you seek, however, I seem to get 0 for the
>>> first and only 626 for the second, so my search-fu is failing me today.
>>
>> Because "~s" ("?section()") doesn't correspond to main/contrib/non-free.
>
> In theory true, but in practice:
>
> $ apt-cache show nvidia-glx | grep ^Section
> Section: non-free/x11
>
> This means a search for contrib or non-free with ~s will succeed, but
> not for for main, since packages in main don't advertise the archive
> component in the Section field.

Thanks for the correction. Although I consider this a cheat or a bonus
depending on the point of view, it's a practical one because AFAIR
dpkg-query doesn't have a "${Archive}" option.