[arch-dev-public] Filename search for Arch

[Aaron Griffin]

On Jan 23, 2008 2:00 PM, Jeff Mickey <jeff at archlinux.org> wrote:
> I agree with everything eliott has said except:
>
> On Jan 23, 2008 2:32 PM, eliott <eliott at 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).