Bug 144613 - yum - misleading description of pattern matching in docs
Summary: yum - misleading description of pattern matching in docs
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: yum
Version: 3
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jeremy Katz
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2005-01-09 20:08 UTC by Michal Jaegermann
Modified: 2014-01-21 22:50 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-01-10 03:38:28 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


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Description Michal Jaegermann 2005-01-09 20:08:11 UTC
Description of problem:

'man yum' repeteadly talks about matching package names with
regular expressions but when one tries to use them it turns
out that these "regular expressions" are really shell matching
patterns, a.k.a. "wildcards", which are quite different things.

For example a command

    yum list installed 'kernel*24*'

lists non-matching as a regular expression

Installed Packages
kernel.x86_64                            2.6.9-1.724_FC3    installed

A pattern like 'kernel*24????' will also be fine; but if one will
indeed try to use a regular expression instead

   yum list installed 'kernel.*24.*'   
   
then on my FC3 installation this returns silently.  The same with
any other yum request I tried.

Comment 1 Seth Vidal 2005-01-10 03:38:28 UTC
Cool. Fixed up the manpage in cvs.
thanks

Comment 2 Michal Jaegermann 2005-02-28 20:58:53 UTC
In a sense Seth is right as manpage now says:

    All the list  options  mentioned  above  take  file-glob-syntax
    wildcards  or  package names as arguments, for example yum list
    available foo* will list  all  available  packages  that  match
    foo*.

but in descriptions above one can see 'regexp1' and 'regexp2'
everywhere.  One needs to be a "documentation lawyer" to notice
that this "regexp" is not really a "regexp".

A global 's/regexp/filespec/' on a manpage would make that much
cleaner.


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