ports/www is too full

[Tillman Hodgson]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:17:41AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> About the only way I can see for doing this task effectively would be
> a google-like keyword search over the contents of the pkg-descr files.
> The pkg-descr files generally contain a pretty good summary of what
> the port actually contains -- much better than just relying on port
> names.  Hmmmm... it should be possible to hook up htDig indexing the
> README.html files.

It would be better, yes, but it would still be playing "hunt the keyword
in the stack of 12000 pkg-descrs". If you picked a good keyword you get
200 hits and still have to browse through them. If you pick a bad
keyword, you get no hits.

Perhaps if pkg-descr had a KEYWORDS: line and it's use was considered
mandatory ... but what are the chances that every port maintainers idea
of a keyword is the same as mine?

I think meta-information like fine-grained categories are different than
searching.

> Although did you just try typing in 'apache modules' into the search
> facility right on the http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ page?  You can
> even tell it to just search the package descriptions.

Oh, I agree that there are tools out there that do very cool things with
the ports tree. I'm a regular spelunker (love that word) at
freshports.org. That's not exactly part of the FreeBSD tool set on a
non-networked machine though, so I don't think it's _directly_
relevant to this discussion.

I'm not even advocating the use of finely-grained categories. I'm just
pointing out that searching is not the same as browsing :-). I wouldn't
use Google to select the right chapter of the Handbook to read--I'd use
the table of contents. Searching is useful, and it's very important and
thus worth spending time getting right, but it's a different tool for a
different (albeit related) task.

Here's a better example:

Let's say that rather than being the maintainer of the net/latd port,
I'm some random user who wants the `llogin` program. So I `cd /usr/ports
&& make search key=llogin`. But there's no hits.

There's 989 ports in the net/ category. Searching failed. Browsing that
directory for the port I want is very difficult. But if there was, say,
a dozen sub-categories my task becomes manageable. Maybe in the
net/other-protocols (or whatever) category there's only a score of
ports. Maybe the name "latd" then rings a bell.

Granted, the ability to search pkg-plist would solve this particular
issue. It's easy to find examples where that won't work: if I just want
to see what neat kinds of network protocols that FreeBSD has supported
in it's ports tree, for example.

-T


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