Searching for packages which contain a certain file is a useful feature, but it seems limited in that you need to provide the full installation path, which is hard to guess. For example `pkcon search file firefox` doesn't return anything, but `pkcon search file /usr/bin/firefox` does return the firefox package. So would it be possible to allow an optional mode that enables either regex or at least globbing? It would be something like this: pkcon search file --regex "firefox$" pkcon search file --glob "**/firefox"
This actually applies to all searches, so changing the summary. For example searching for the package named "ed" returns a pile of matches, all which contain the substring "ed" in the package name. If the following option was allowed, results would be better: $ pkcon search --regex ^ed$ At least apt supports regex searching by default, otherwise pkcon could complain with a not-supported error.
Searching for single files is allowed in the API, see http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/tree/src/org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction.xml#n1103 for details. What backend are you using? yum, apt? It's likely these just need supported added.
OK. The backend is yum. As far as the command line is concerned, they seem to support such searches by running `yum provides "*/firefox"` - Note that the */ prefix is needed for matching basenames. But the problem would remain for `pkcon search` which treats argument as a substring (the "ed" problem). Maybe I should file that as another bug.
We moved the upstream bugtracker to GitHub a long time ago. If this issue still affects you please re-create the issue here: https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/issues Sorry for the impersonal message, and fingers crossed your issue no longer happens. Thanks.
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