[Aptitude-devel] aptitude ~A question

[Sven Joachim]

On 2016-11-03 15:46 +0100, steve wrote:

> I'm trying to understand why
>
> aptitude search ~Ajessie~i | wc -l
> 240
>
> is different from
>
> aptitude search ~Astable~i | wc -l
> 3243
>
> but is the same as
>
> aptitude search ~Ajessie-backports~i | wc -l
> 240
>
>
> This is something difficult to interpret and that's the reason I'm
> raising this question on aptitude-devel@ (this subject is currently
> being discussed on debian-user@ without any success). Reading the docs
> and asking search engines hasn't given much unfortunately. May I ask to
> explain or point me to a relevant ressource? Code will not help me since
> I'm not a developer. 

I guess that's because aptitude does not know that jessie = stable.  I
get these results for unstable:

,----
| $ aptitude search ~Aunstable~i | wc -l
| 2414
| $ aptitude search ~Asid~i | wc -l
| 0
`----

Note that the archive (= distribution) in these searches is interpreted
as a regular expression[1], so if you want to search for packages from
jessie but not jessie-backports, you need to use something like
"aptitude search '~Ajessie$~i' | wc -l".

HTH,
    Sven


1. http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s04s05.html#searchArchive