This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Apt-cache search X and you get a list so long you might as well google it. I appreciate the benefit that prefix provides under certain circumstances, but it's been abused so badly that finding the right package becomes a huge list that will have to be manually sorted when you can't recall the name of the package you are looking for.
I will also second the list of abusers, X, py, K, lib (yes I know lib is probably one we have to live with, but there is a package I can't recall with a name that has lib in it but it's not a library and it's impossible to find) and several others have made searching for anything with those characters an exercise in futility.
Posted Sep 27, 2012 19:01 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
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Hah! Try apt-cache searching for "R" (the math/statistics package)
(Debian calls it r-core, but you have to know that in order to know it.)
Naming conventions
Posted Sep 27, 2012 19:02 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
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I even got it wrong. It's r-base :(
Naming conventions
Posted Sep 27, 2012 20:03 UTC (Thu) by sjj (subscriber, #2020)
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apt-cache search --names-only '^r-' is a bit better but you have to know about the hyphen in package names.
Naming conventions
Posted Oct 3, 2012 18:45 UTC (Wed) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
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'axi-cache search r' works a lot better.
wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator
Posted Sep 28, 2012 6:34 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497)
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> there is a package I can't recall with a name that has lib in it but it's not a library
libreoffice?
The binary names in it are also fun: I kept parsing 'localc' as 'local-c' and trying to understand what it was (a local C compiler?) before I understood it was actually 'l-o-calc'.
wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator
Posted Oct 1, 2012 9:34 UTC (Mon) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
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librecad is another example.
wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator
Posted Sep 29, 2012 9:45 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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How can you expect any single letter to be searchable?