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

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

On Wed 24 Jan 2018 at 16:38:24 (+0000), Curt wrote:
> On 2018-01-24, <tomas@tuxteam.de> <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
> >
> >> > [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.
> >
> 
> I ticked 'Descriptions' (for 'stable', 'any') which searches package
> names and descriptions, and the keyword 'syslog' returned 101 matching
> packages, of which rsyslog was one.
> 
> I'm not sure that demonstrates anything of any utility, though.

Well, it nicely demonstrates that 29 was nowhere near the limit
that it feels it has to place on the number of results.

And as Debian fragments its packages more and more, perhaps
that limit should be (a) selectable and (b) behave as a
cut-off, ie display matches up to the limit instead of nothing.

Cheers,
David.