[arch-dev-public] Filename search for Arch

[Dan McGee]

On Jan 23, 2008 12:42 PM, Simo Leone <simo at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:23:55AM -0800, Jason Chu wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 07:10:37PM +0100, Thomas Bächler 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?
> >
> > Hmm... you use to be able to seacrh through package lists through the
> > web interface.  Did this change when we moved to django or something?
> >
> > Jason
>
> It did not. Filelists still get inserted into the sql database when you
> run the update scripts on gerolde, however there is no way to access
> them through the current django interface. All the data is there and
> perfectly up to date though.

I think this would be far more useful than the date field we removed,
for instance. Can we add a file search somewhere to the web interface?

Obviously you can throw "patches welcome" back in my face. :)

-Dan