Andrei Thorp wrote:

Hello there!

Today, I'd like to be all complainy about the AUR search feature. I haven't really looked around, but are there plans to improve it? Or is the solution just "use google with site://"?

It seems to be kind of bad at finding stuff. Some examples: - Can't search by description (well, it does search by description by default, but it's not in the advanced options anywhere) - Can't really do any decent multi-word searches afaik. To take an example from the other argument thread, try searching for "java gstreamer". It finds neither gstreamer-java nor java-gstreamer. It actually finds nothing at all. - Similarly, wildcards seem to not work. "java*gstreamer" has no results. - It seems to not even do exact matches first. For example, search for my package, "sup". There is a package in AUR that's exactly named "sup", but if you search for that, you get 658 results, sorted alphabetically! - Which reminds me, what about sorting by relevance somehow? Perhaps sort by a weighting of votes, age, downloads, etc.

I'm sorry if I'm bringing this up as someone's already writing improvements for AUR and this is just a waste of time :)

Anyway, thanks!

I gotta admit... I laughed when I saw the signature: Andrei Thorp, Developer: Xandros Corp. (http://www.xandros.com) -- Daniel J Griffiths (Ghost1227) griffithsdj@archlinux.us http://ghost1227.com

On Tue 23 Jun 2009 17:00 -0400, Andrei Thorp wrote:

Today, I'd like to be all complainy about the AUR search feature. I haven't really looked around, but are there plans to improve it? Or is the solution just "use google with site://"?

Good to hear someone's thinking about AUR. :D

It seems to be kind of bad at finding stuff. Some examples: - Can't search by description (well, it does search by description by default, but it's not in the advanced options anywhere) - Can't really do any decent multi-word searches afaik. To take an example from the other argument thread, try searching for "java gstreamer". It finds neither gstreamer-java nor java-gstreamer. It actually finds nothing at all.

It's literally searching for the string "java gstreamer" if no description contains that string, then you'll have zero results.

- Similarly, wildcards seem to not work. "java*gstreamer" has no results.

See: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_User_Guidelines#Searching_the_AUR

- It seems to not even do exact matches first. For example, search for my package, "sup". There is a package in AUR that's exactly named "sup", but if you search for that, you get 658 results, sorted alphabetically!

Putting the exact match first is something I was considering adding. Patches still welcome!

- Which reminds me, what about sorting by relevance somehow? Perhaps sort by a weighting of votes, age, downloads, etc.

You can already sort by votes and age. The AUR is in maintenance mode pretty much. If people don't complain enough, or patches aren't submitted, it will remain as-is. Well, there is still a pending release as there are a few patches that aren't reflected in 1.5.6.2. I'm going to try to take time to think up and work out a prototype for a robust system that will run the next generation of AUR. Right now I have some measly shell script to help me flesh out my ideas hah. As Greg noted, discussion on AUR development is welcome and encouraged on the aur-dev mailing list. Cheers!