Yum/dnf Search Functionality

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Thu Jun 26 14:35:29 UTC 2014


Allegedly, on or about 26 June 2014, Stephen Morris sent:
> neither yum nor dnf, both of which give the same results, 
> didn't suggest to try a further search, but I would have thought that
> as a minimum they would have searched installed packages first. It is 
> completely illogical to me for a product to do a search for specified 
> functionality and not tell you that functionality is provided by 
> something you already have installed. 

For what it's worth, it searches the yum database for matches.  The yum
database contains information on all packages, installed, or not.  If
the database hasn't been recently cached (the definition of recent can
be configured by you), then it will update the cache, first.

I'm currently booted up on an older installation, but when I did "yum
search music" it returned a list of applications that have some *music*
keyword in some of their metadata.  And, the last line of the results
said:

 Name and summary matches only, use "search all" for everything.

And the results included things I have installed, those these results
don't indicate whether its results are uninstalled, or installed.  If
you did a subsequent yum info packagename, on anything that caught your
interest, that would show whether it was installed (in this example, the
"repo" line either shows where you can get it from, or that it's
installed).

Then I did a test to search for something that will produce no results,
I tried the following command line, and got the following results:

 yum search giraffe
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Warning: No matches found for: giraffe
No Matches found

I'm surprised that it didn't tag on the use search all message.  Perhaps
it would be good if it falls back on doing yum search all, for you, if
there was no results.  Though, that could be a nuisance, in itself.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
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George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.





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