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

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 + wontfix


(It's unlikely that we change this in aptitude or add new config options
to that effect, so setting the bug priority and tags accordingly... but
read on)


Hi,

2016-08-13 15:10 shirish शिरीष:
>in-line :-
>
>On 11/08/2016, Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org> wrote:
>> Hi shirish,
>
>Hi Axel,
>
><snipped>
>
>> 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.
>
>Could you tell/share/remind why does aptitude do it differently than
>apt-cache or axi-cache .  I do find using apt-cache or axi-cache
>search to be better in this aspect rather than plain aptitude :(
>
>I have always been telling friends that aptitude is better than other
>package managers, more powerful and yet pretty convenient.
>
>Is there some reason that we do not use the description wildcard when
>searching for packages. ? And I know this will be a big change and
>probably not welcomed by most/many sys-admins so not saying that.
>
>If I were to change the behavior in my aptitude installation, where or
>how I could do the change so the above behavior that you shared could
>be simulated.
>
>I forgot to share that I had seen both man apt.conf and the examples
>given at /usr/share/doc/examples and specifically the
>configure-index.gz but didn't become any wiser.
>
>I would like to make changes and keep it at /etc/apt/apt.conf so when
>the searches happen, it happens both for name as well as description .
>Even doing it ~/.aptitude is ok but didn't see any possibilities in
>either the aptitude or apt-conf man page.
>
>Look forward to knowing more.

As Axel said, a more-or-less equivalent in bash would be:

  aptitude search {~d,~n}marathi

It's easy to add a function or an alias in bash to get the results:

  $ function aptitude_enhanced_search() { aptitude search {~d,~n}$1; }

  $ aptitude_enhanced_search marathi
  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
  i   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


-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>