On 13/10/2025 16:43, fxkl47BF@protonmail.com wrote:
On Mon, 13 Oct 2025, The Wanderer wrote:On 2025-10-13 at 10:34, fxkl47BF@protonmail.com wrote:On Mon, 13 Oct 2025, Greg Wooledge wrote:On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 13:07:37 +0000, fxkl47BF@protonmail.com wrote:i've read that several times i don't see anything that tells me the details of how apt is performing the searchI don't understand what you're asking. ~e means the rest of it is a regex (regular expression) which is matched against the source package name. (It would be nice if it specified which flavor of regex it's using, because there are many.) ^science is a regex that matches any string/line beginning with the substring "science". (At least in BRE, ERE and PCRE flavors.) So, putting it together, it should match all packages whose source package name begins with "science". When I run it on my system, I get the following result: hobbit:~$ apt list '~e^science' ESC[32mlibjs-sciencejsESC[0m/stable,stable 1.9.3+dfsg-4 all This package is not installed, so it seems it's looking at available packages. This is the package it's referring to: hobbit:~$ apt-cache show libjs-sciencejs Package: libjs-sciencejs Source: science.js Version: 1.9.3+dfsg-4 [...] As you can see, its source package name is "science.js" which does in fact begin with "science". So, it looks like it's working as documented.apt list ~e^science is an example not what i'm interested in i'm interested in the details of how apt go about doing whatever it's doingWell, what details are you interested in getting?
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Have you considered running apt in a debugger? That would allow you to step through the functions, add watches, breakpoints etc? If you're trying to debug how apt works, then a debugger is the natural choice, isn't it?i guess that about covers it from what i've read apt does not provide debug that let you look under the covers it's read the code or nothing thanks
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