[Aptitude-devel] search for word "package" returns high number of results

[Cyril Chaboisseau]

* Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> [2009-11-30 04:11 -0800]:

> > Looking for a package manager, I did the following search:
> > aptitude search ~dpackage
> > 
> > which gave me a very high (14636) number of packages which of course are
> > not related to my query
> 
>   Well, yes, they are.  You asked for packages whose description
> contains "package"; you got them.  Unfortunately, a lot of packages
> say something like "documentation for this package is available in
> foo-doc" or "this package contains..." in their description.

whoops!

you're right:
there is indeed a whole lot of packages that mention this word in their
package description
(very unfortunate)

> > BTW, this "bug" is also present with apt which returns a lower number of
> > results:
> > 
> > $ apt-cache search package|wc -l
> > 14558
> 
>   Odd that it's less.  As far as I can tell from a quick check,
> apt-cache doesn't search packages that are locally installed but not
> present in the archive.

after a more in-depth search, it appears that 51 packages are returned by
"aptitude ~dpackage" while they don't have any reference with this word
when doing an "aptitude show <package_name>"

(compressed list in attachment)

here is some that you can check:
dhcp3-client
dhcp3-common
dhcp3-dev
dhcp3-server
empathy
empathy-dbg
exim4-base
exim4-config
exim4-daemon-heavy
exim4-daemon-heavy-dbg
exim4-daemon-light
exim4-daemon-light-dbg
exim4-dbg
exim4-dev
icedtea-gcjwebplugin
k3b-data
[...]


-- 
	Cyril Chaboisseau
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