On Tuesday 05 December 2006 23:56, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2006-12-05, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> That's nasty. Why do some equery commands accept regexes and > >> others dont? > > > > Because some equery commands search for packages (ideally > > suited for a regex), and others by design operate on a single > > package (where using regexes don't make any sense). > > But that differentiation seems purely artificial. What is > there about the "print size" operation that makes it something > you can't or shouldn't do on multiple packages? Why shouldn't > the operation of "pkgspec" and "command" be orthogonal? > "pkgspec" selects zero or more packages and the command > operates on the selected package.
It should, but alas it doesn't. It was coded that way. > Why the limitation that some commands only operate on one > package? Because the dev decided to do it that way. > > It all makes perfect sense when you realize this, but no-one > > expects you to realize it immediately :-) > > Well, it seems pretty non-intuitive and non-orthogonal to me. I > guess that's a result of many years of shell usage where > commands like "rm" and "ls" work equally well on a single file > or multiple files. There's only one way you are going to get equery to behave like you want - become the maintainer and code it like you want. alan -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
