Brock Pytlik wrote:
> I'm not sure this is the best example (because I'm not sure what you were
> hoping to get out of searching smf but the info I'd hope for, like what
> package installs smf, or smf services, isn't really present in either set
> of results) but I also don't think quibbling about examples is fruitful.
I was playing the part of the naive user who wanted to find out what
package installed SMF (because it's one of Solaris' coolest features). Of
course, I don't know that no single package does that, so all I get back is
bogus results. With -a, I at least know why each package was shown to me,
even if I'm still lost as to what package delivers SMF.
> I'm happy to gather the data, but I've no idea how go about it. Because
> -a (effectively) was the default, the numbers are obviously skewed
> heavily in one direction. What I feel reasonably safe in saying is that
> in queries with more than one term in them, almost no one actually wanted
> the effect of using multiple bare terms in a -a query. Now, maybe the
> number of multiterm queries is so tiny that it's meaningless (and that's
> data we can get).
It might be a useful datapoint, though if people never use it because it's
too hard to use correctly, the data might not be all *that* useful.
I hardly ever use multiple term searches, so I tried a couple. I tried to
find a package that contained both "smf" and "/lib/svc/method". Being
confused by the use of "<>", I tried a bunch of differeht things:
pkg search smf /lib/svc/method
pkg search "smf /lib/svc/method"
pkg search "<smf lib/svc/method>"
pkg search "<smf>" "</lib/svc/method>"
where the quotes are shell-parsed.
I (as a slightly less naive user than before) still would have expected for
at least one of those queries to return at least the desktop-cache package
which delivers a set action with the word "smf" in it and a directory
action with the path /lib/svc/method.
The first three each returned no results, and the last resulted in a 502
Bad Gateway, which, IIRC, is what happens when Apache times out its
connection to the back-end depot. Is that going to be the new behavior of
the first command above?
While I'm open to -p by default, it's certainly less useful to me, and I'm
curious to see some actual reasons why people would prefer it, other than
unsupported statements from you and Shawn expressing your belief that this
is what people expect and/or would want. I know collecting data on this is
hard; I'd be happy even with some anecdotal evidence from people not
directly on the pkg(5) team.
Danek
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