On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 07:32:12PM +0000, Riku Voipio wrote: > On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:32:45PM +0100, Christian Seiler wrote: > > On 01/05/2017 02:06 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > > Quoting Riku Voipio (2017-01-05 12:53:16) > > >> Vast majority of users would only install this via dependencies. It's > > >> hardly a node-specific problem that debian package searches output > > >> large amount of packages that are not useful unless you happen to be a > > >> programmer. > > > > > > ...and I agree that the issue is not specific to node-* packages, but I > > > find it is quite common there. Quite likely due to recent inclusion of > > > lots of packages, prepared semi-automated - as Philip pointed out very > > > well. > > > Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default? > > > I think most users don't care about libraries in any language (be it > > Perl, C, JS, Python, ...), but only care about software they > > use directly. And developers that do care about libraries could pass > > a flag to APT to say "yeah, please show me all packages that match > > this". And maybe even indicated how many library packages were not > > shown in the default search results? > > After some thinking, instead of hiding better to group by: > > $ apt search gif > > [ GUI applicatoins ] > gimp > mirage > ... > [ CLI applications ] > gif2png > gnuift > imagemagick > .. > [ programming libraries ] > libgif > libsdl-image > python-pil > .. > [ documentation ] > libgif-doc > ... > $ > > I think the data for grouping can be theoretically mined from debtags.
I think one of the main problems with `apt(-cache) search` is that what it takes is a regexp, and that most of the time, you're better served by doing your search with \b as both prefix and suffix. $ apt-cache search '\bgif\b' | wc -l 138 $ apt-cache search gif | wc -l 198 More extreme example, which actually happened to me a couple days ago because I was checking whether there is a package for the KAGE engine (a glyph generator for chinese characters ; http://fonts.jp/engine.html) $ apt-cache search kage | wc -l 31104 $ apt-cache search '\bkage\b' | wc -l 1 Mike
