can't search for packages with (too) short names

[soquel]

Affected Version

yay v12.4.2 - libalpm v15.0.0

Describe the bug

When searching for packages with (arguably) silly names like q, yay does not behave in an expected way and does not make it obvious there was an error.

Reproduction Steps

1. run yay q
2. the list of matched packages is huge (obviously) and the error (shown below) is buried at the top of the output -- hard to spot
3. the package q is actually not found at all and thus not offered for installation

Expected behavior

I would expect the list to be long -- as it is -- but for the exact-name-matching package to be the first in the list, i.e. at the bottom with id 1.

Output

➜ yay q
 -> Error during AUR search: 1 error occurred:
	* status 200: Query arg too small.



 -> Showing repo packages only
1167 multilib/lib32-libdv 1.0.0-9 (55.0 KiB 126.8 KiB) 
    The Quasar DV codec (libdv) is a software codec for DV video (32-bit)
1166 multilib/lib32-gamemode 1.8.2-1 (10.1 KiB 31.1 KiB) 
    A daemon/lib combo that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS
...
2 core/sqlite 3.47.1-2 (1.9 MiB 9.8 MiB) (Installed: 3.47.1-1)
    A C library that implements an SQL database engine
1 core/qgpgme-qt6 1.24.1-1 (313.4 KiB 1.4 MiB) (Installed)
    Qt6 bindings for GPGme
==> Packages to install (eg: 1 2 3, 1-3 or ^4)
==> 

Is this yay or libalpm issue? If the latter, why yay doesn't stop after the Query arg too small error and still lists some packages? That was confusing, because I assumed since it listed something, it was all that matched q, but that is actually not the case.

[jdholtz]

This is a limitation with the Aurweb RPC interface, not yay. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Aurweb_RPC_interface

I do agree that Yay can make this error more obvious. Probably at least printing the error as a warning at the bottom or saying command completed with 1 error.