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szutt

Member

Registered: 2019-02-03

Posts: 35  

They really will break everything

The apt(8) command no longer accepts regular expressions or wildcards as package arguments, use patterns (see New Features).

* https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments … _released/
* https://blog.jak-linux.org/2019/08/15/apt-patterns/

Yet another important program that's going to have to be forked...

czeekaj

Member

Registered: 2019-06-12

Posts: 154  

Re: They really will break everything

Maybe we can be even more free and have pacman as an option with apt
I like to use wild cards.
However, if you are worried about it you can always pipe.

apt list | grep installed | less
apt list | grep *pulse* 

for example I recently discovered I am running without libpulse0. I started from minimal and built up, a lot of those meta package dependencies are really truly a mess, Normally I'd have no problem with pulse audio. But the dependency breakage with apt is something quite odd makes me dislike it regardless of who made it.

However, you are right. I use wild cards sometimes for removing programs, I can't remember the name of exactly. But list will have to suffice if it changes.

Last edited by czeekaj (2020-03-08 03:43:51)

bgstack15

Member

Registered: 2018-02-04

Posts: 205  

Re: They really will break everything

Wow, what was wrong with globbing? My friend moving to FreeBSD doesn't have to deal with bad decisions like this. (FreeBSD has their own bad decisions...)

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Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: They really will break everything

IMO patterns are really useful and much more flexible than regex (not globbing btw, they're different things).

One drawback of regex is mentioned in the linked blog post:

Another thing I want to do ASAP is to disable fallback to regular expressions when specifying package names on the command-line: apt install g++ should always look for a package called g++, and not for any package containing g (g++ being a valid regex) when there is no g++ package.

It should also be noted that regex is not being dropped completely:

I think continuing to allow regular expressions if they start with ^ or end with $ is fine - that prevents any overlap with package names, and would avoid breaking most stuff.

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