search in adept installer inconsistent with manager

[Benjamin Kay]

Binary package hint: adept

Searching in adept manager and adept installer yields different results. I'm using adept 3.0~beta4ubuntu3 from Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) Beta on an amd64 machine. See related bugs 70095 and 263438.

I realize that adept installer and adept manager are supposed to behave differently, since the former is supposed to be "simpler" and thus more "user friendly". However I think it's odd that adept installer, which is billed as the "Add/Remove Software" of Kubuntu, can't always find a package by its name (try searching for hddtemp, for example).

I also think it would be nice to have fairly consistent keywords search between the two. For example, suppose I (being a power user) am using adept manager and my Grandma is using installer. I want her to install plasmoid-weather, so I tell her to search for "weather". But the only package she finds is "Eat The Whistle", an "arcade-style soccer game". That's not user-friendly, that's just confusing.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

They don't just behave different, they are different.
Manager relys on the complete archive cache, installer relys on app-install-data. Simply put: manager can install everything, installer only applications with GUI (more precise, such which ship a desktop file in usr/share/applications).
That is the reason you can find hddtemp with manager, but not with installer.

The plasmoid issue is basically due to the same reason (their desktop files are not shipped in the path stated above). Fixing this would have to be done in app-install-data-ubuntu, so please report a bug to include plasmoids in the database of app-install.

Thank you for this report.

[Benjamin Kay (benkay)]

Thanks for the explanation. I submitted bug #286662 against kdeplasma-addons. There are probably other packages missing from app-install-data, but since developers and power-users tend not to use adept-installer themselves, it may take a while to notice them.

I still think the search algorithm for adept-installer is a bit odd. For example, searching for office in adept-installer probably ought to bring up everything in the "Office" category, but for some reason it only brings up "OpenOffice.org Drawing" on my test rig. What if I want to install KOffice? What if I want to remove OpenOffice.org Writer?