portindex -- the second coming.

[Christopher Nehren]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 17:38:54 +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> After the recent fun and games with the sysutils/portindex port by
> Radim Kolar, it seems there is a pent up demand for software that can
> maintain /usr/ports/INDEX without the hassle of going through a full
> 'make index' every time you want to update.
> 
> I've put together a few bits of perl to achieve that.  Now I'm looking
> for people to try it out, send me feedback, bug reports, suggestions
> etc.  To be beta testers in fact.

Yum. I also appreciate your choice of implementation language. :)
 
Although, actually, the main reason for why I liked portindex was that it
made an extremely detailed entry of every single port in a PostgreSQL
database. You could then make complex queries against that database using
SQL. You could see which ports you had installed which depended upon a
group of ports that matched a regex, for example (using subqueries --
which is one of the reasons why I'm glad that PostgreSQL was chosen,
instead of a certain overly popular RDBMS which shall remain nameless
which lacks this feature). I don't know about others, but the SQL
interface is much more intuitive for me than using make syntax. And it's
more flexible, too. Not to mention that you can easily make graphs from
it, and so forth ...

If you're interested, I'd like to implement the RDBMS side of your
portindex replacement.

I'll take a look at your replacement later tonight, and shall give further
feedback either then or tomorrow.