[pacman-dev] pac-file utility script

[pete morris]

Hi all,

First a quick introduction, since this is my first message to the list.  I am 
a CS grad student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, and I also 
do IT work for JMU's art department.  I've been using arch for around 2.5 
years now.

Anyway, I've written a script that takes advantage of the [repo].files.tar.gz 
filelists that are now available to discover which package provides a 
particular file, when that package is not installed on the user's machine.  It 
is similar to debian's apt-file, if you are familiar with that.  I would 
appreciate any comments on the script, with an eye toward possible inclusion 
in Allan's pacman-contrib community package.

The script uses the mirrors defined in the user's /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and 
downloads the filelists for the repos enabled in /etc/pacman.conf.  It is 
available from http://threadstates.com/downloads/pac-file.  

The only major issue I can see is in the handling of non-standard repos, 
including local ones.  The repo names are obtained from pacman.conf's "[repo]" 
lines, and the name of the repo is substituted for $repo in the mirror url 
from the mirrorlist.  If a local repo (for example) is defined in pacman.conf 
as "[local]", on a 'sync' operation, pac-file will attempt to download 
local.files.tar.gz from every mirror enabled in the mirrorlist.  This will not 
cause the script to fail (it will report that the file is unavailable from any 
mirror and continue on), but it will waste time.  I am hesitant to limit the 
possible repos to the official ones because there might be third party repos 
that provides filelists.  Suggestions?

Thanks,
Pete