portsearch: approach to finding ports that provide a given file

[Alexander Leidinger]

Jean-Yves Lefort <jylefort at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 11:48:05 +0200
> Vasil Dimov <vd at datamax.bg> wrote:
>
>> Some ports generate their plists after being installed, making it
>> impossible to record the plist without fetching the source tarballs,
>> compiling and installing the software. Currently for these ports empty
>> or flawed plists are recorded. One way to fix this problem is to
>> retrieve the plists for these ports from the precompiled packages
>> available at ftp.freebsd.org but the whole packages need to be fetched,
>> causing (large) amount of unefficient network traffic.
>> Any ideas for resolving the problem are welcome.
>
> The package building scripts (Tools/portbuild) could be modified to
> create pkgname-metadata.tbz files and make them available on the
> FreeBSD ftp site. An utility which would retrieve these files and
> maintain a database could then be created. Said utility could be run
> by end users on their home machines, as well as by some machine on the
> FreeBSD cluster which would maintain a database queryable through
> www.FreeBSD.org. This approach requires coordination with the package
> building and www people.

"make fetchindex" like operation comes into mind... "make fetchsearchindex"?

Bye,
Alexander.

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