[aur-dev] Wildcards in search queries

[kachelaqa]

I just recently noticed that the wildcards have been disabled in 
aur-1.9.1 - which is a pity, since it has removed some fairly useful 
functionality.

I found bug FS#26527 that prompted the change, and read through the 
links - but I couldn't completely understand the rationale for it.

It looks like there may be a problem with search queries that consist of 
only '%' wildcards, as that could match everything in the database.

But wouldn't it be fairly easy to eliminate pathological cases like 
that? And aren't there already checks in place to limit the number of 
results returned?

For me, the most useful feature of wildcards is that they can be used to 
*reduce* the number of results returned - which is somewhat ironic, if I 
have interpreted the rationale for this change correctly ;-)