Re: Hiding library packages from apt searches by default? (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)
On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 07:32:12PM +0000, Riku Voipio wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:32:45PM +0100, Christian Seiler wrote:
> > On 01/05/2017 02:06 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > > Quoting Riku Voipio (2017-01-05 12:53:16)
> > >> Vast majority of users would only install this via dependencies. It's
> > >> hardly a node-specific problem that debian package searches output
> > >> large amount of packages that are not useful unless you happen to be a
> > >> programmer.
> > >
> > > ...and I agree that the issue is not specific to node-* packages, but I
> > > find it is quite common there. Quite likely due to recent inclusion of
> > > lots of packages, prepared semi-automated - as Philip pointed out very
> > > well.
>
> > Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default?
>
> > I think most users don't care about libraries in any language (be it
> > Perl, C, JS, Python, ...), but only care about software they
> > use directly. And developers that do care about libraries could pass
> > a flag to APT to say "yeah, please show me all packages that match
> > this". And maybe even indicated how many library packages were not
> > shown in the default search results?
>
> After some thinking, instead of hiding better to group by:
>
> $ apt search gif
>
> [ GUI applicatoins ]
> gimp
> mirage
> ...
> [ CLI applications ]
> gif2png
> gnuift
> imagemagick
> ..
> [ programming libraries ]
> libgif
> libsdl-image
> python-pil
> ..
> [ documentation ]
> libgif-doc
> ...
> $
>
> I think the data for grouping can be theoretically mined from debtags.
I think one of the main problems with `apt(-cache) search` is that what
it takes is a regexp, and that most of the time, you're better served by
doing your search with \b as both prefix and suffix.
$ apt-cache search '\bgif\b' | wc -l
138
$ apt-cache search gif | wc -l
198
More extreme example, which actually happened to me a couple days ago
because I was checking whether there is a package for the KAGE engine (a
glyph generator for chinese characters ; http://fonts.jp/engine.html)
$ apt-cache search kage | wc -l
31104
$ apt-cache search '\bkage\b' | wc -l
1
Mike
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