I’ve been working on a significant rearchitecture of Debian Code Search during the last few months (off and on, as time permits). This will enable us to provide a couple of features that have been often requested but were not possible with the old architecture, such as grouping search results by Debian source package (#1 feature request) and performing queries that take a longer time than the default execution limit of a minute (#2 feature request). Oh, and it also will be a lot faster :-).

All of this (unfortunately?) also requires a redesign of the user interface as the old way of displaying results is just fundamentally incompatible with the new architecture. This is why it’s taking longer than I’d like (never redesign both backend and frontend at the same time), but I’m implementing various nice improvements along the way and I think the result will be worth the wait.

Lea has helped me a lot re-designing the visual appearence of the search results page, and the new look (of the upcoming “group by package” feature!) is what I want to share in this blog post. If you have any comments, please let me know (via email to my debian address, stapelberg@). Enjoy: