[packagekit] RFC: standardising on search terms

Sebastian Heinlein glatzor at ubuntu.com
Thu Dec 25 01:13:42 PST 2008


Am Sonntag, den 21.12.2008, 20:52 +0000 schrieb Richard Hughes:
> At the moment we don't specify any sort of standard used for the search
> term for the SearchName or SearchDetails methods.
> 
> I think it's a good idea these methods are case insensitive, but I'm not
> sure about the following search syntaxes:
> 
> * gnome manager power
> * gnome-power-*
> * gnome-?????-manager (exact char length match)
> * gnome OR power OR manager
> * Device AND ( Power OR Disk )

Actually the apt backend can make use of xapian and so would already
support an advanced syntax.

We should support the basic operations most people use when searching in
google: multiple key words. But I don't see a reason not to silently
support regular expressions or boolean operations.

I even have got a bug report about not working multiple keywords.
Furthermore personally I regularly search for more than one term and
expect from every search machine (in the web or in programs) to support
this naturally.

Why add this to the client side? Clients should be as tiny as possible.
If you don't want to have this in the backends you should add this to
the packagekit daemon. But this could be a slow down: running the search
over the cache several times and merging the results.

Cheers,

Sebastian




More information about the PackageKit mailing list