Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: equery refactorization

[Douglas Anderson]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Marius Mauch <genone@g.o> wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:44:25 +0900
> "Douglas Anderson" <dja@××××××.com> wrote:
>
>> I also thought about renaming the "list(l)" option as "search",
>> because if you look at the help output, almost every module "lists"
>> something. equery's "list" is actually a search, I don't see why we
>> shouldn't name it that. I think maybe list was used because there were
>> already two "s" options, stats and size. Stats is not implemented so
>> I'm taking it out of help for now. Size can use the short "z", becaues
>> that's quite unique. That would free up "s" for search and it would be
>> a whole lot clearer.
>>
>> Yes? No?
>
> No. "search" (if used at all) should be reserved for a more
> comprehensive search framework (though IMO a separate tool for that is
> more appropriate), not just a simple name match. "list" makes sense if
> you consider that the pkgspec argument is optional, and one of the main
> tasks of it is to simply list the packages in the given repository
> (that's why vardb is also the default for it) without further filtering.
>
> Also one of the main goals of equery (according to karltk, the original
> author) was to have a stable user interface, compared to the deprecated
> qpkg and etcat scripts. And while the equery interface isn't exactly
> the best I've seen it has been stable, so you might want to think twice
> before renaming options and eventually pissing off users or breaking
> third-party scripts.
>
> Marius
>
>
$ equery list -h
List all packages matching a query pattern
Syntax:
  list <local-opts> pkgspec
<local-opts> is either of:
  -i, --installed         - search installed packages (default)
  -I, --exclude-installed - do not search installed packages
  -p, --portage-tree      - also search in portage tree (/usr/portage)
  -o, --overlay-tree      - also search in overlay tree
(/usr/portage/local/layman/wschlich-testing
/usr/portage/local/layman/xwing /usr/portage/local/layman/genscripts
/usr/portage/local/layman/wschlich-testing
/usr/portage/local/layman/xwing /usr/portage/local/layman/genscripts
/usr/local/portage)
  -f, --full-regex        - query is a regular expression
  -e, --exact-name        - list only those packages that exactly match
  -d, --duplicates        - list only installed duplicate packages

That's an awful lot of "searching" there for something that's
definitely not a search. List is really ambiguous, but whatever.

I understand the point of having a stable interface, but this is
probably the most widely recommended tool on the forums and #gentoo.
Stability is not a good enough reason to let it bit rot. Wasn't a more
unified tool interface also one of the original goals of gentoolkit?

-Doug