2018-03-21 2:56 GMT+08:00 Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@archlinux.org>:
What is the rationale for making it part of name and name-desc? Wouldn't it make more sense to add a new search type ("providers")? I vote for a new search type "providers". For my use case, I'd appreciate if I can get precise information from the RPC, instead of parsing the aurweb html or crawling the entire AUR. I prefer having a bulk query here so I can keep the request count low.
Well, we have no precedent here as archweb does not allow searching by provides either AFAICT. But I think, generally speaking, from a usability perspective any search that is not an exact-name search is probably *interested* in these provides packages.
pacman -Ss will show them, pacman -S will install them, so the web interfaces arguably should do the same.
Actually I just found it confusing that: pacman -Ss 'gcc>7' shows nothing, yet pacman -S 'gcc>7' will do the right stuff I'd argue that pacman should provide a search providers. But at least it has alpm_find_satisifier.