[pacman-dev] Feature request: Show exact matches first

[lolilolicon]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 3:55 AM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 09:37:22PM +0200, Markus Jochim wrote:
>> Dear developers,
>>
>> I'd like to request a feature. When I search for some package, let's
>> say openconnect:
>>
>> $ pacman -Ss openconnect (or -Qs)
>>
>> it takes quite a while until I get any results on my netbook (Atom
>> N450 cpu). Maybe this could be sped up by showing exact matches
>> right away. I've had this situation quite some times now and it can
>> be a real pain in the ass to wait for 10 seconds (this may vary of
>> course) when I simply want to know whether I have a particular
>> package installed.
>>
>> Kindly,
>>
>> Markus
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> The overhead here is disk I/O, not CPU. Looking for exact matches first
> will not save you any time. Additionally, once your local DB is paged
> into RAM, results should come much more quickly.
>
> To humor you, and assuming your DBPath is /var/lib/pacman, you can use
> something like the following bash function to get exact matches:
>
>  # assumes extglob is enabled
>  findexact() {
>    res=(/var/lib/pacman/local/$1-+([!-])-+([0-9]))

I noticed a slight problem here- PKGBUILD(5) states the pkgrel variable is
"not allowed to contain hyphens".
So I realize possibly this, as well as my fix for bacman, is not exactly
correct.  I haven't checked the pacman code though, can you confirm?

Actually all of my local packages conform to the common practice of making
pkgrel an integer, but I know a package in AUR, namely fortune-mod-tbbt,
currently at 0.2-3.1, and presumably pacman doesn't complain about it.

>    [[ -d $res ]]
>  }
>
> The function returns 0 (found) or 1 (not found).
>
> I make no guarantees that this continues to work in the future as it's
> dependent on our DB format.
>
> dave
>
>