[Aptitude-devel] Complex search query creation widget

[Daniel Burrows]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 10:43:58AM -0500, Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> was heard to say:
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 03:06:08PM +0100, Obey Arthur Liu <arthur at milliways.fr> was heard to say:
> > I've been thinking about adding some GUI to expose the powerful search
> > query syntax of aptitude. It's a shame that many don't use it.
> > Currently, there's mainly a Entry for the query and a Button to initiate
> > search. There's also a ComboBox to limit the query according to the
> > installed/not installed/whatever status of the package.
> > 
> > I'm joining a changeset that adds some checkboxes for "broken",
> > "configured"... and puts everything except the Entry and Button into an
> > expander.
> 
>   I don't think that a search like this is especially useful, since it
> only supports a few pre-chosen searches and will very quickly become
> cluttered -- I'd rather introduce a search term builder like you find in
> a lot of mail clients.  I'm thinking it would be a dialog or a separate
> tab (this would also mean we could use it to build new filters in the
> dropdown menu).  The whole thing would be popped up by an "Edit..."
> button next to Find.

  I was thinking some more about this.

  I think that my objection is less to the idea of having some "make
a more complicated query" widget, and more to using a series of
checkboxes to implement it.  It could very well be useful to have a
small widget collection for building a single search term built into
the search tab, with a button to pop up a full editor for complex
searches.  Ideally the single-term editor would be more-or-less the
same as the term editor in the search builder dialog, so that the user
doesn't have to learn so many controls.  A reasonable analogue to this
is search engines that offer both "advanced" and "power" searches
depending on how complicated the user's needs are.

  I'm undecided on whether to hide the current "Show:" dropdown menu
with the rest of the "advanced" search features, but I suppose it makes
sense.

  Daniel