On Jan 23, 2008 12:10 PM, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
It is a much requested feature: Someone wants to search for a filename and get a package name, and there is no possibility in Arch.
I have scripts to generate filelists from the package files which could run once a day or so. However, cactus (after a short jabber discussion) disagress with me on how the search would be done:
My suggestion: Create a script on the webserver that "greps" through the prepared filelists or searches a sql database, then gives you a machine-readable output via xml or json that can be displayed in a client (for example a 'pacman -So' option). However, cactus thinks that this would put too much load on the server.
Another possibility: Make the filelists available for (optional) download and search them offline (with pacman or another tool). My problem here is: total 140M -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 35M Jan 21 17:06 filelist.community-i686 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 34M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.community-x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.6M Jan 21 16:52 filelist.core-i686 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.6M Jan 21 16:52 filelist.core-x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 32M Jan 21 16:57 filelist.extra-i686 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 32M Jan 21 17:02 filelist.extra-x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 2.1M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.testing-i686 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 2.0M Jan 21 17:12 filelist.testing-x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.2M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.unstable-i686 -rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 673K Jan 21 17:11 filelist.unstable-x86_64
Which is 8.9MB compressed with bz2, a lot to download if you have to update the lists every day to have an up-to-date version.
What do you guys think?
I would implement this as follows: Add some option to repo-add to generate a second list like above. "repo-add --filelists" would generate extra.files.tar.gz or something Then a pacman config option like so: SyncFilelists = yes And everything else should flow from there. Integrating json and xml parsing into pacman just seems.... wrong