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

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 09:05:08AM -0600, David Wright wrote:
> 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.

[...]

> 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).

Not a real solution, but a trick would be to choose "source packages";
this cuts down a few of the hydra's heads, and rsyslog shows then up.
Given that a source package gives birth to three binary packages (or
sometimes many more), some amount of combinatorial explosion is not
surprising.

> 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."

I do use that page as a second source, whenever I don't understand
what apt/aptitude are trying to tell me -- or whenever I'm looking
up something for a distribution I currently don't have access to.
For that, the page is invaluable to me, despite its defficiencies.

YMMV, and all that :-)

Cheers
- -- tomás
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