There's another thing about apt that's bothered me: apt-cache search isn't a very good search engine. Its most common use case is finding the exact name of some library/framework package, ie, "apt-cache search someframework". For common frameworks, this produces hundred of search results for packages that <i>use</i> the framework and mention this in their description, while the framework itself is in the list but very difficult to find. The --names-only flag fixes this, but it's not the default so it's one more thing to worry about.