[Aptitude-devel] cmdline/cmdline_download.cc:53: download method and tildes

[Daniel Burrows]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:21:43PM -0400, Vincent Labrecque <vincent.labrecque at xandros.com> was heard to say:
> Here's a message I sent to Daniel a few days ago:  [%]

  Hi, Vincent.  Since we're replaying this in public, I'll include my
earlier reply to you below.  The reply to your follow-up question: I
think this should be fixed by making "download" understand patterns and
handle them in a "reasonable" way (i.e., download all the matching
packages).

  Earlier correspondence with more information follows:

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 04:48:20PM -0400, Vincent Labrecque
<vnc at pobox.com> was heard to say:
> Is there any reason why aptitude (silently!) ignores package names
> passed to the download command if they contain a tilde?

  I don't know why it does that.  That's a very old line of code, dating
back to the initial introduction of the "download" action in March 2002.
Apparently when I added it I knew it wasn't right, because I wrote a
FIXME next to it.  I think the idea was to eventually treat things that
looked like search patterns as search patterns and then download all the
matching packages.  Presumably I forgot about this because I never use
"download".

  Daniel