Dear apt developers, I wrote a shell script, really a wrapper around apt-cache, which allows to choose packages with pattern a or pattern b and not pattern c. Oh and it helps the user to filter out interesting matches (by invoking $EDITOR) and get their full description (by piping the output of apt-cache show to $PAGER). The question is whether you'd be interested to include such functionality upstream, in which case I'd be happy to try to extend apt-cache.cc Here's a description of the shell script. http://bluebits.gr/weblog/en/tech/programming/grep-pattern-utilities-2007-07-22-23-01.html I've also rewritten it using the python binding of the apt library (attached; but it's still slower than invoking apt-cache several times!). Cheers, Serafeim
Attachment:
findpackages.py
Description: application/python