Comment 15 for bug 282995

Sorry, your bug link is wrong, so I've removed it as it just confuses the real issue. It's great to see people actively triaging tickets in Launchpad, but please resist the temptation to latch onto likely sounding upstream tickets without reading them carefully to see if they are actually related.

Xapian ticket #22 is about improving the handling of hyphenated phrases containing a single character component. You'd generally expect e-mail and email to match the same documents (at least in English).

The initial example in this ticket "ubuntu-res" clearly doesn't fall into that category, since neither "ubuntu" nor "res" are single characters.

The bug here is not in Xapian, but in how Xapian is being used. So it's a bug in synaptic, or perhaps apt-xapian-index. Or maybe both, since you need the indexer and searcher to agree on how the index is built.

If you use Xapian's TermGenerator and QueryParser classes, then a hyphen is indexed as if it were a space, but at search time it generates a phrase.

But if you want to handle it differently, you can generate whatever terms you want, and parse queries however you want. It sounds from this ticket like for quick search, most people expect "-" to be part of a term, and many expect an implicit wildcard at the end (so ubuntu-res to match ubuntu-restricted-extras).