On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:49:03AM +0100, Stuart Prescott
<stuart+deb...@nanonanonano.net> was heard to say:
> aptitude search '?archive(now)'
>
> matches all packages that are in installed or removed (not purged) states.
> Naturally,
>
> aptitude search '?archive(foobar)'
>
> matches 0 packages and
>
> aptitude search '?archive(stable)'
>
> matches (most) of the packages on this machine (not backports.org etc).
>
> So it seems that "now" is a special, undocumented value for the archive
> match. I can't see that "now" would have any use and (as below) it makes life
> a little harder than it should be to do things.
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. I'm
not sure if that means this needs the wontfix flag -- it sounds like
you'd be happy to have some other way of doing the same thing.
(you might ask who would use this feature, but I've been amazed at
some of the other stuff people depended on)
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)
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))))
Daniel
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