[Aptitude-devel] Bug#834073: Bug#834073: aptitude search gives less results than apt-cache search

[Axel Beckert]

Hi shirish,

shirish शिरीष wrote:
> As shared above, aptitude search gives far less results than
> apt-cache search.

Yes. It does so for ages.

> For instance -
>
> [$] aptitude search marathi
>
> p   task-marathi                                                    -
> Marathi environment
> p   task-marathi-desktop                                            -
> Marathi desktop
>
> Now let's try the same using either apt-cache or axi-cache
>
> [$] apt-cache search marathi
>                                                              [0:07:03]
> aspell-mr - Marathi (mr) dictionary for GNU aspell
> festival-mr - festival text to speech synthesizer for Marathi language
[...]

"apt-cache search" by default searches package name _and_ description.

"aptitude search" by default searches only in packages names -- which
also can be seen nicely in your examples.

See the documentation at e.g.
http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s04s05.html#searchTermReferenceList

If you want the same result as with apt-cache use e.g. this command:

→ aptitude search "~dmarathi" "~nmarathi"
p   aspell-mr                      - Marathi (mr) dictionary for GNU aspell
p   festival-mr                    - festival text to speech synthesizer for Marathi language
p   festvox-mr-nsk                 - Marathi male speaker for festival
p   firefox-esr-l10n-mr            - Marathi language package for Firefox ESR
p   firefox-l10n-mr                - Marathi language package for Firefox
p   fonts-deva-extra               - Free fonts for Devanagari script
p   fonts-gargi                    - OpenType Devanagari font
p   fonts-lohit-deva               - Lohit TrueType font for Devanagari script
p   fonts-nakula                   - Free Unicode compliant Devanagari font
p   fonts-sahadeva                 - Free Unicode compliant Devanagari font
p   fonts-samyak-deva              - Samyak TrueType font for Devanagari script
p   fonts-sarai                    - truetype font for devanagari script
p   gcompris-sound-mr              - Indian Marathi sound files for GCompris
p   hyphen-mr                      - Marathi hyphenation patterns for LibreOffice
p   iceweasel-l10n-mr              - Marathi language package for Iceweasel - Transitional package
p   iok                            - Indic Onscreen Keyboard
p   iok:i386                       - Indic Onscreen Keyboard
p   kde-l10n-mr                    - Marathi (mr) localization files for KDE
p   libreoffice-l10n-mr            - office productivity suite -- Marathi language package
p   task-marathi                   - Marathi environment
p   task-marathi-desktop           - Marathi desktop
p   tesseract-ocr-mar              - tesseract-ocr language files for Marathi

In the opposite direction, you'll get the same result as "aptitude
search" with "apt-cache search -n":

→ apt-cache search -n marathi
task-marathi - Marathi environment
task-marathi-desktop - Marathi desktop

So unless you want to change aptitude's default, I don't see any bug
here and would like to close this bug report again.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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