I’m trying to find different versions of the alsa package for 11.3 and when I type alsa in the box it says “325 binaries from 155 source packages”. Most of those are clearly things I don’t want, such as the Tumbleweed repository or packages whose name happens to include the string “alsa”. But I don’t see any method to filter the results either by repository or more accurate matching criteria. Also, it lists just ten packages per page and I don’t see any method to make longer pages, ideally a single page with all results so I can just scan it.
Have I missed something? Is there a better way?
Oh and then there’s my standard gripe that it uses javascript unecessarily to display the two options it does provide.
I agree with you 100%: while the software search does deal with the simpler cases very well, in a situation in which it doesn’t do what you want, there doesn’t seem to be much that you can do to change what you get into what you wanted.
As far as I know, there is no way of putting in a terminator, so that in this case you could just search for, say, alsa: (or whatever) and get results that match with a string terminating …alsa. That would often be very helpful, with -debugs and -libs and add-ons of various sorts.
That would be good, too. I’d be far happier, if all else failed, to get one big page that I could just search through. But it is an ‘if all else failed’ option.
On that, my gripe is that, by default, it hides the status of those options. The number of times that I go in, search, find too much or too little, and only afterwards realise that I haven’t checked what the status of those was and have to go back… I mean, there are only two selections, why can’t they be displayed by default?
My other gripe would be that, without some kind of way of limiting searches further than exists currently, if you get the ‘too many results to display’ message, there really isn’t that much that you can do about it. Well, you can exclude debug and home projects, but if that doesn’t do it for you, seemingly you have reached the end of your path.
I’m not specifically answering your question, but IMHO reference updating alsa, the answer is typically don’t update it as it could mean future kernel updates will cause you a problem. Only update alsa if you are forced to because of some serious audio problems.
There is a guide here (that I need to update) on how to update alsa for openSUSE: SDB:Alsa-update - openSUSE