[DOCS] npm search --long flag has no effect about cli

[joshbax189]

I recovered the "expected" behavior with only a few small changes to search.js (marked in comments)

class Search extends BaseCommand {
// ...
  async exec (args) {
    const opts = {
      ...this.npm.flatOptions,
      ...this.npm.flatOptions.search,
      detailed: true, // NEW: request full response from search API
      include: args.map(s => s.toLowerCase()).filter(s => s),
      exclude: this.npm.flatOptions.search.exclude.split(/\s+/),
    }

    // NEW: long is not in flatOptions
    const returnLong = this.npm.config.get('long');

    if (opts.include.length === 0) {
      throw new Error('search must be called with arguments')
    }

    // Used later to figure out whether we had any packages go out
    let anyOutput = false

    class FilterStream extends Minipass {
      constructor () {
        super({ objectMode: true })
        console.log(opts);
      }

      write (pkg) {
        // NEW: pkg now contains a package prop plus extra info
        if (filter(pkg.package, opts.include, opts.exclude)) {
          // NEW: only JSON output supports extra fields
          super.write((returnLong && opts.json) ? pkg : pkg.package)
        }
      }
    }
// ... class continues
}

This would add support for --long when using --json, but not otherwise. It would be helpful to have access to the popularity and flags.insecure props from the CLI ;)

On the other hand, it would also make loads of sense to just remove the --long flag from search altogether and update the docs appropriately.

[wraithgar]

I thing --long probably doesn't make sense anymore. It was a bandage over the real problem, which is that table output for search was not a good fit. All it ever actually did was prevent the columns from truncating, which it looks like it hasn't been doing since npm@6.

As far as adding those flags, that'd be a separate feature request. I don't thing popularity is likely to be added, but I think adding an extra line of caution if insecure is not 0 would be a great addition to the search results.

[wraithgar]

Closing this as it's not a bug, but if someone wants to submit a PR to add something if insecure is true that would probably be an easy task.

[wraithgar]

Reopening cause we should remove this from the params

[joshbax189]

Nice job :)