Hi Daniel, > The string "now" actually comes directly from apt. > > I could filter it in search patterns (it's already filtered in > various parts of the UI), but I know that people use the aptitude > command-line in scripts, and making "now" no longer match anything > would be a backwards-incompatible change. So, +wontfix on that.
yes, I found the filtering for "now" in the source code for the UI parts. I
understand not wanting to make a backwards-incompatible change. Perhaps it
should be documented for ?archive() in that case to save people spending
quite so much time as I did the other day trying to work out why they
couldn't negate the match properly.
> As for the rest of your report, I think that you want a ?downloadable
> pattern that would apply on a per-version basis, right? I don't think
> there's really a way to get at that information via the current set of
> patterns, so a new one would make sense. (it's similar to making
> ?obsolete check per version, but doesn't break backwards compatibility)
Yes! a ?downloadable would be good. I presume it would automatically limit
itself to package-versions that are installed and not return all versions of
packages like ?installed does. Not limiting itself like that would require
the use of ?narrow() all the time, I think.
Would it actually make more sense to be in the negated sense already
(something like, ?noarchive), since I would imagine that its primary use will
be to find things that *aren't* downloadable.
?noarchive
looks a lot nicer to deal with than
?not(?downloadable)?installed
which I think is assuming that the ?downloadable package-version set would be
equal to ?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?downloadable). If it's not, then there
would need to be additional ?narrow statements in there somewhere.
[or, more likely, I've misunderstood what you're suggesting here]
> Another option would be to implement an idea I've had for a while, to
> more fully support more "types" in the search language. So you'd have
> something like:
>
> ?has-version(?has-archive(?not(?archive(now))))
I know you said "something like", but I'm not quite sure how that will work
since '?not(?archive(now))' will provide a list of all packages in a "p"
state and not any of the not-downloadable packages.
But I can see what you're trying to sketch here. Yes, having the ability to
include some sorts of tests in the search language would be nice.
Since I presume that these sorts of things won't be available until squeeze+1
at this stage, I'll stick with the monstrosity I included earlier for the
time being. I'm sort of glad that there isn't some really easy way to do this
that I'd just fundamentally missed.
thanks for your thoughts
Stuart
--
Stuart Prescott www.nanoNANOnano.net
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