Comment # 6 on bug 1038305 from Dave Plater

I did indeed first notice the zypper se gstreamer-plugins problem from Bug
1057168 in 42.2 and it is now in 42.3. It's important to note that zypper se
alsa-plugins succeeds as does a search for alsa-plugins- although searching for
alsa-plugins- also finds alsa-plugins.
Now I see what actually happens:
zypper se libzypp-plugin should find libzypp-plugin-appdata but it doesn't but
zypper se zypp-plugin finds all instances because there is a package called
zypp-plugin to find but in the case of gstreamer-plugins and libzypp-plugin
there isn't a package called by that name. If I were to create a dummy rpm
called gstreamer-plugins then zypper se would find all instances of it.
This is not the same as the reporter's bug which also still exists in 42.3.

Maybe this isn't actually a bug because:
zypper se gstreamer-plugins* succeeds and also zypper se -s python-* gives the
output that the reporter requires.
zypper se --help states:
* and ? wildcards can also be used within search strings.
If a search string is enclosed in '/', it's interpreted as a regular
expression.

and enclosing /python-/ or /gstreamer-plugins/ gives the expected result.