qsearch ignores all packages whose ebuilds either do not have a DESCRIPTION in the .ebuild file (e.g. gtkhtml-sharp, see bug #175299) or whose description cannot be parsed (e.g. b43-fwcutter, see bug #203981). This happens even the option -N is passed, i.e. if the user has not requested a description and even for searches such as -s and -a that do not need to evaluate the description. This is unexpected and makes qsearch a lot less useful. Many times a user only cares about a) if a package exists at all, b) if there are several variants, c) what the complete package atom is, if part of it is known. qsearch could answer all of these questions without access to the description. Even in the case when -N is not passed, qsearch can (and should) do better than drop the package from the results if -s or -a is used. In these cases, a "no description available" output would be more useful than no output at all. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. qsearch -Ns gtkhtml-sharp 2. qsearch -s gtkhtml-sharp Actual Results: 1. <no output> 2. <no output> Expected Results: 1. dev-dotnet/gtkhtml-sharp 2. dev-dotnet/gtkhtml-sharp No description available. Try passing the -c option.
Created attachment 139799 [details, diff] Fix for the bug. I've attached a patch that fixes this issue.
CACHE_METADATA is now default for qsearch. A new option(-e) was added for the fallback method of using CACHE_EBUILD
