ppa packages are hard to discover

The top three show in the same page are sorted by the karma of the source package's creator. This was designed like this specifically to a) not slow the page rendering down, b) not overwhelm the reader, and c) present the most useful results.

The "search for other" link does search on package names - if I click the link on the vlc page you suggested it reports 102 PPAs that contain vlc, including the 6 examples you've posted.

I'm not sure what else you mean? If I missed something can you let me know.

Thanks.

Thank you for the response.

Okay, I think what I'm really looking at is that the "search for other" link should display at a glance the versions of the package for each release (perhaps filterable by release) - in other words, more like the information shown on the original package page.

Example use case that is hard now:
1) find all PPAs for VLC for say Hardy
2) decide based on version/quality of packages/karma/somehow which PPA to use

The problem with that approach is that the search term is not a package name, it just happens to match packages in the PPAs. The term also matches descriptions and PPA names.

I do empathise with your problem though, I have experienced it myself. Perhaps we could sort the resulting PPA list by karma of the PPA's owner, similar to what we do for the list in +source ?

[Expired for Launchpad itself because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

the four things I would like to see in PPA package search

- ability to optionally restrict the search to package names only (exclude changelogs, etc.)
- ability to optionally restrict the search to particular releases
- ability to optionally restrict the search to updates within the last X weeks
- ability to restrict to certain package versions (higher/lower than Y, disregarding epoch)

releases = distro series (precise, trusty, etc.)