On Jan 23, 2008 3:11 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 23, 2008 2:00 PM, Jeff Mickey <jeff@archlinux.org> wrote:
I agree with everything eliott has said except:
On Jan 23, 2008 2:32 PM, eliott <eliott@cactuswax.net> wrote:
3. Why would someone need to search to see what owns a file that they don't have on their system, with pacman?
My favorite case for this is when I build something from source and either I don't look up or don't know the dependencies of the app. It spits out some linking error about some library file. Wouldn't be awesome if I could just pacman -So /lib/libyourmother.so.hot and it spit out that I was looking for extra/your-mother? This is just one very simple example. Not to mention it'll also help someone who has something that needs to be recompiled, because they can run pacman -So /lib/yourmother.so.hot.3 and see that it isn't in any up to date packages.
The current scenario is me asking someone else to search on THEIR system for it, or searching google to find a relevant piece of software and then figure out of arch has that piece of software. Not awesome.
I think this is a useful feature IF implemented as phrakture states, which is merely throwing around filelists that are compressed on the mirrors. For people who don't want to download it, they shouldn't be forced to.
After talking to cactus on jabber, he pointed out the fact that the critical phrase in that sentence is "with pacman". It appears that the common case for looking up library names and things like that is related to *building* packages and software, and as such, might fit better as a supplementary tool to makepkg (or even in devtools).
For looking up library names, yes. There are other cases though - when (for example) glxgears and glxinfo moved into their own package (mesa-apps) tons of people were asking where they went. Even I didn't know for a while. There's already the uudecode example provided earlier. And which package is kde-app-X located inside? kdm? I don't know. In any case, there are valid use cases for this feature that don't necessarily include building packages.