Dear Maintainer,

Please look at the following output:

  % apt search x-window-manager
  Sorting... Done
  Full Text Search... Done
  matchbox-themes-extra/stable,stable 0.3-4 all
    extra themes for matchbox-window-manager

  matchbox-window-manager/stable 1.2-osso21-2+b1 amd64
    window manager for resource-limited systems

  xorg/stable,now 1:7.7+19 amd64 [installed,automatic]
    X.Org X Window System

  % apt-cache search x-window-manager
  9wm - X11 window manager inspired by Plan 9's rio
  aewm - minimalist window manager for X11
  aewm++ - minimal window manager written in C++
  afterstep - window manager with the NEXTSTEP look and feel
  awesome - highly configurable X window manager
  blackbox - Window manager for X
  bspwm - Binary space partitioning window manager
  [...]
  wm2 - small, unconfigurable window manager
  wmaker - NeXTSTEP-like window manager for X
  wmii - lightweight tabbed and tiled X11 window manager, version 3
  xfwm4 - window manager of the Xfce project
  xmonad - Lightweight X11 window manager written in Haskell
  xorg - X.Org X Window System
  amiwm - The Amiga look alike window manager
  notion - tiling tabbed window manager designed for keyboard users

  % apt-cache search x-window-manager | wc -l
  59

There are two issues here:

* [1] The list of packages differ (3 vs 59 packages)
* [2] The output format is not the same (2 lines + empty line vs 1 line per package)

Given that the man page of apt(8) states the following

,----
| The apt(8) commandline is designed as an end-user tool and it may change behavior between
| versions. While it tries not to break backward compatibility this is not guaranteed either if a
| change seems beneficial for interactive use.
|
| All features of apt(8) are available in dedicated APT tools like apt-get(8) and apt-cache(8) as
| well.  apt(8) just changes the default value of some options (see apt.conf(5) and specifically
| the Binary scope). So you should prefer using these commands (potentially with some additional
| options enabled) in your scripts as they keep backward compatibility as much as possible.
`----

we should be ok with [2] but we should document why the output looks different
and - if possible - how to change the output format.

But shouldn't the package list be the same? Or shouldn't there be a setting to
archive that and shouldn't that be documented?

After browsing the source (together with zeha, thx!), we found how to force apt
search to output in the "traditional" way:

  apt -oAPT::Cache::Search::Version=1 search x-window-manager

Thank you for looking into this and please tell us what we can do to help.

Regards from the Debian-BSP, Salzburg :),
 - Darsha

Hi,

This happens because "x-window-manager" as a string appears only in
those three package descriptions. The old search finds them because
these packages have a "Provides: x-window-manager" which the new one
isn't taking into consideration. I think that can be argued both ways
and then it might still not be the intended result for this request
given that with such a 'search' a user is likely looking for packages
with that provides line only (which is somewhat approximated by -n in
old search, but that can again be argued both ways). So that request
might be better served by 'show' – if it would list providers instead of
being useless at the moment with virtual packages.

Yeah. We wanted to experiment with showing more details. I am not that
much of a fan of new myself especially as we aren't paging yet, but old
is equally bad in its own way…

You don't happen to have an nice formatting idea, do you?



Yes, this reply is more documenting the status quo and the problems
around it than it is about changing it. Personally I want to look into
stuff like paging before revisiting search in the hope that we have
accumulated some feedback and (better) ideas by then.

Thanks for the report, for joining a BSP & for (assisted) code diving!


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

That'd get nasty, let's not have more magic in there. We should end up
with apt search/show ?provides(x-window-manager) instead.

Hey,

reviewing old bugs at the end of the (virtual) Debian-BSP 2021.. :)

As it seems things haven't changed so far, but just wanted to send a
ping to ask about the current status.

Also two years later, I still think 'apt search x-window-manager'
should at least list the available x-window-manager.

Hope you are doing fine. All the best,
 - Darsha