[Aptitude-devel] Bug#710751: "why" should work on patterns

[jidanni at jidanni.org]

DH> What is the function of the non-final arguments (‘bluetooth’ …
DH> ‘bluez-compat’) doing in this example?

Erg, upon reading the man page

           If one or more <pattern>s are present, then aptitude will begin its
           search at these patterns; that is, the first package in the chain
           it prints will be a package matching the pattern in question. The
           patterns are considered to be package names unless they contain a
           tilde character ("~") or a question mark ("?"), in which case they
           are treated as search patterns (see the section "Search Patterns"
           in the aptitude reference manual).

I have a better idea,

# aptitude why ~i~nblue
E: Unable to locate package ~i~nblue

should add an additional
E: Usage:   aptitude [<options>...] {why | why-not} [<patterns>...] <package>

or something, else erm... the user might think those names get expanded
first before being handed to the rest of the machinery.

Anyway at least I proved that <package> should probably be <packages>...
on the man page.

(I was trying to just "do several at once, like apt-cache", nothing fancy.)