[packagekit] Listing all packages

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 17:43 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> There doesn't appear to be a way for a PackageKit client to request a
> list of all the available, or all installed packages, from PackageKit.
> 
> Is this intentional, or should the functionality be available through
> the search functions?

Well, no! What do you need the package list for? The SearchX functions
shouldn't search for strings less that two chars, and some backends
limit the results to the first 100. If you need this functionality I
think a new function might be sane, without a search term but with
filter functionality.

Such a thing might also be useful when implementing search-as-you-type
which is a feature we should probably be working towards.

> While on the subject of searches, is the backend supposed to support
> anything more than basic string searches? e.g. glob pattern support.

Nope, no globbing - the rationale being most users don't know how to use
them. People tent to search for "gimp" rather than "gimp-*"

Richard.