Hi,

apt-file is not able to find files provided by the alternative system. I understand that those files are not exactly "a file in the package" but the package is reponsible for the file being there and therefore apt-file should find it.
I stumbled upon that when searching for packages that provide /usr/bin/mail. Both apt-file and packages.debian.org only find the package 'mailutils' but IIRC there are at least 3 other packages which provide it via the alternatives system, bsd-mailx for example.
I was unsure of the priority of this bug. On the one hand i'd say it's a wish, on the other hand i think this tool is pretty useless if it's just going to ignore things like alternatives and who knows what else might come altogether and just displays a minor subset of relevant packages.

Thank you and best regards

Hendrik

apt-get depends on the Contents files that it downloads from the
mirrors. The information about alternatives is simply not present in
the Contents files, so there is no way for apt-file to display it. And
since the alternatives are set up by the postinst scripts, they cannot
be easily extracted from the .deb files. Therefore I don't think this
bug is going to be fixed any time soon.

Cheers,
Stefan