On Sat, 10 Nov 2018, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Most definitely short forms of N, or N-V, or N-V-R, or N.A, or N-E:V, etc are
> supported by rpm queries, and not only on the CLI, but also in the API.
I understand these short forms better than the thing without a name.
Each of them makes sense to me.
(Now that's a talk about the input (arguments) to `rpm --query`, whereas
what I have been talkin before was its *output* format. I was concerned
with extending the output format so that it is not ugly and there is a
little chance to break other scripts that parse it which mustn't
necessarily be broken.)
> Adding DistTag just makes the package identifier retrieval "label" more
> complicated.
So, I'd say that just each of the short forms above must be added a
disttag. Then we'd get the new list of short forms by adding them to the
list above. (As you have said, one might wish to query by just specifying
the disttag, so it's independent from the presence of other values.)
N:D, N-V:D, N-V-R:D, N:D.A, N-E:V:D
We see now that in the input, there would be an ambiguity between `N-V:D`
and `N-E:V`.
To resolve it, we might require to write `N-:V:D`, otherwise let it be
interpreted as `N-E:V`.
Now `N-:V`, `N-:V-R`, `N-:V-R.A` are accepted well already.
(But how to teach the users that they should use a second colon in this
ambiguous case?.. Perhaps, always require the second colon, if they want
to put a disttag in the short form. But that implies also a seconf colon
in the complete form, so that output format should be changed from
`N-[E:]V-R[:D].A` to `N-[E]:V-R[:D].A`, which is a more ugly.)
That's a drawback of choosing colon, which is already used as a separator.
But on the other hand, I don't like the zoo of having all separators look
diferently.
--
Best regards,
Ivan
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