distribution.searchSourcePackages doesn't work for distributions without primary archives

[Dan Ryan]

I was attempting to traverse the API today to get from a private distribution to all of its member source packages. While I know the following functionality works (using e.g. `python-urllib3` as an example):

>>> pkg = distro.getSourcePackage(name="python-urllib3")
>>> assert pkg is not None
>>>

I was experimenting with the `distro.searchSourcePackages()` operation. According to the API docs @ https://launchpad.net/+apidoc/devel.html#distribution

> source_match
> (required)
> Source package name substring match

Given that explanation, I would expect a search for a substring contained within the target package name to return a list that includes the target package. So, in this case, I would expect a search for, e.g., 'python', to include 'python-urllib3'. Here is what happens:

>>> source_packages = list(distro.searchSourcePackages(source_match="python"))
>>> len(source_packages)
0

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The problem isn't substrings - it's that the private distribution in question has no primary archive, and `Distribution.searchSourcePackages` only looks for package names published in the primary archive (and the mostly-obsolete primary archive).

I'm not sure what to do about this - we may need to invent a way to designate certain PPAs as "official", which is something I thought about early on but there didn't seem to be a pressing need for it at the time.

[Dan Ryan (techalchemy)]

FWIW I also tried to search the archive(s) in soss, but:

>>> archives = list(distro.archives)
>>> len(archives)
1
>>> archives[0].name
primary

I tried looking on DistroSeries, DistroArchSeries etc but couldn't find anything useful.