Hello there,
I'm not sure where to post this so I'll try here.
I wrote a little Python script to help you out with apt that I'm
calling "aptsearch."
Basically you can search the availible package list in
/var/state/apt/lists for a regular expression.
If you invoke with -i, it will present an interactive command buffer
that lists the resulting packages. You can remove/restore packages
from the list or have them installed with apt-get install.
I know that apt-cache search will do a very similar thing, and a bit
faster, but this script has a couple of advantages (to some people):
1/ Can do a full information search
This would let you search for a specific maintainer's
packages, for instance. Or "show me all packages that depend on
package foo." (You'd do this by using "Depends.*foo" as the
arguement.)
2/ Can restrict to name only or description only search.
apt-cache does desc only, not name only as far as I know. And
I think it doesn't search stuff like maintainer, depends, etc.
3/ Can optionally install the packages with apt-get
You could fake this by interfacing apt-cache's output with awk
or something to apt-get install, but my script has an interactive
editing buffer w/ emacs bindings thanks to Python.
Naturally, it's not perfect. The main drawback is that it takes about
10-12 seconds to do most searches on my Pentium-233. This is
considerably longer than apt-cache takes. I'd like to optimize it
more, maybe that's where I need help. Part of the overhead is Python
I suppose, but there might be a more efficient way to code it in Python.
Well, anyway, I'm not sure where to go with this from here. I know I
will be using it myself but it would be great if it helped others. Maybe
someone on this list can give me an idea. Perhaps I should just make
a debian package of it and post it on my tripod page or something, I
don't know. If anyone would like to try out the script, just email
me. I'd love to have some feedback on it.
Thanks,
Preston
