On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 01:49:55AM +0000, Paul Wise wrote: > On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 10:12 PM Julian Andres Klode wrote: > > > # The solution > > I would have thought the way to go would be to introduce explicit > --raw --fnmatch --regex --pattern options for each different package > name matching system.
Patterns all start with either ? or ~ and hence are safe - no packages start with that name, and they are easy to filter out too if you want to write a wrapper around apt. So no need for --pattern :D - Patterns subsume regular expressions - The syntax more closely aligns with aptitude - You can combine patterns with literals, which you can't do with options; for example, ~n^linux-image-.*-amd64 foo. Once the shortforms are there, it's also shorter to type than options :) Patterns are coming _precisely_ because I want to avoid having to add ad-hoc options for each and every thing, and unify that into one syntax that works everywhere (policy and search still need work, though). I want you to be able to write ?name(apt) as an argument to install, an argument to show, an argument to search, or as a Package name in the preferences file. One syntax, consistent behavior across all places you can specify package names (except search has a different meaning of literals, because it searches descriptions :D). -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en