[aur-dev] Wildcards in search queries

Dave Reisner d at falconindy.com
Thu Oct 4 14:06:44 EDT 2012


On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 06:59:49PM +0100, kachelaqa wrote:
> 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 ;-)
> 

I never even knew this feature existed.

<shameless bump>
If you want something that's actually good at searching the AUR, I
suggest using cower. It hackishly implements regex and boolean AND'd
results. I've been very happy with it.
</shameless bump>


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