Packages web page, was Re: Aptitude package manager "package"

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Wed 24 Jan 2018 at 10:53:17 (+0100), tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 10:21:45AM +0100, Floris wrote:
> > Op Tue, 23 Jan 2018 20:44:19 +0100 schreef OECT T <oect_1964@hotmail.com>:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > >I searched into Synaptics package manager and noticed that the
> > >package is not marked with the Debian icon >indicating that the
> > >package is not supported.
> > >
> > On my system (Debian sid) aptitude has the Debian logo in synaptics.
> 
> Folks, learn to use the web site. Just surf over to [1] and you can
> query the current package database. For example, entering "aptitude"
> into the form and choosing "any" as Distribution shows you what
> distributions carry aptitude as a package [2] (and which versions
> of said package are in each distrib).
> [1] https://packages.debian.org/
> [2] https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=aptitude&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

Hm. I had occasion to go to ¹ yesterday. (In passing, if I remove the
word "index", I end up at a different page ² but the results are the
same.) With the defaults (package names/stetch/any) I typed syslog.

With only 29 matches returned, I was surprised to also get the message
"Your keyword was too generic, for optimizing reasons some results
might have been suppressed. Please consider using a longer keyword or
more keywords." ³

OK, so syslog-ng seems to have more heads than a hydra, but what was
more concerning was that there was no mention of rsyslog (which was
what I was really interested in).

So forget using this page for anything really vague like kernel-image,
even if you set suite, section and then architecture; it can't even
show you the most basic generic versions like linux-image-686-pae, but
only "You have searched for packages that [sic] names contain kernel-image
in suite(s) stretch, all★ sections, and architecture(s) amd64." and
"Your keyword was too generic. Please consider using a longer keyword
or more keywords."

★ yes, selecting the architecture widens the sections back to all.

¹
https://packages.debian.org/index
²
https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
³
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=syslog&searchon=names&suite=stretch&section=all

Cheers,
David.