ports/www is too full

[Matthew Seaman]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 09:13:06PM -0600, Tillman Hodgson wrote:

> Let's say I'm looking for a Apache modules. I'm not looking for anything
> in particular, I just want to see what's been ported. Window-shopping.

> There's 792 ports in the www tree according to `ls | wc -l`. Of those,
> 113 are _possibly_ Apache modules (as determined by `ls -d *mod* | wc
> -l`). Which of those are really Apache modules, and of those, which are
> Apache 1.3.x modules is impossible to easily tell from the output.
> `grep`ing for "mod" in the output of some utility would have the same
> problem. The fallacy I've fallen into with this example, and the fallacy
> that searching tools fall into, is the idea that port names are always
> going to be representative of what the port contains (or at least that
> the port comment will magically have the right keywords). That's not the
> same thing as meta-information like fined-grained categories.

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.

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.

	Cheers,

	Matthew
	
-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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