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

[Daniel Burrows]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:44:58PM +0100, Cyril Chaboisseau <cyril.chaboisseau at free.fr> was heard to say:
> 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.

  They aren't relevant to what you *wanted*, but then you'll have to
tell aptitude more specifically what you want (maybe something like
"?description(package *manager)").

> 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.

  Daniel