[arch-general] AUR Search

[Loui Chang]

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!