[arch-dev-public] Filename search for Arch

Travis Willard travis at archlinux.org
Wed Jan 23 15:19:01 EST 2008


On Jan 23, 2008 3:11 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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).

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.




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