Bug 65566

Summary:	extend "emerge -s" (fuzzy search, search options)
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Mark <mark.morschhaeuser>
Component:	Core - Interface (emerge)	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	enhancement	Keywords:	InVCS
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	604854

Description Mark 2004-09-27 12:18:08 UTC

It would be great to have a fuzzy search in emerge because when you search a program and don't know it's exact name, you cannot find it with emerge.
Example: maybe you want to find "gkrellkam" but don't know it's name, so you're searching for gkrellm and cam and both searches will not find it.
The only way is a manual search in x11-plugins.

Furtheron it would be nice to have AND+OR+NOT+ONLY search-parameters like:
emerge -s gettext NOT ruby
emerge -s http ONLY perl

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2004-09-27 20:40:04 UTC

i feel like everything could be handled with a regexp (which emerge -s supports)

Comment 2 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-04-03 23:45:08 UTC

I'd like to implement this. We've already got fuzzy package name search build into the ambiguous package name response, using difflib.

(In reply to SpanKY from comment #1)
> i feel like everything could be handled with a regexp (which emerge -s
> supports)

In comparison, fuzzy search is effortless for users.

Comment 3 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-04-04 01:09:10 UTC

Using the difflib.get_close_matches function as an example, we can use the SequenceMatcher.ratio() method to measure how similar a package name is to the given search string. We can have options to specify cutoff ratio and maximum number of close matches to return. If a maximum number of matches is specified, it is not be possible to display fuzzy results incrementally, though exact matches can still be displayed incrementally (bug 412471).

Comment 4 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-04-04 05:06:32 UTC

There's a patch in the following branch:

https://github.com/zmedico/portage/tree/bug_65566

I've posted it for review here:

https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/message/8994f6f733d4b49a08721526531a7867

Comment 5 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-07-25 03:02:06 UTC

Patch updated and posted for review:

https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/message/43aba739d5f9b629b98f23bd618a6310
https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/37

Comment 6 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-08-08 15:59:45 UTC

This is in the master branch:

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git/commit/?id=b7f0937a811ef4859333ccc45f8076dca109dc2f

Comment 7 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2017-02-10 18:45:50 UTC

Fixed in portage-2.3.3.