portsearch: approach to finding ports that provide a given file

[Jean-Yves Lefort]

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.

-- 
Jean-Yves Lefort

jylefort at FreeBSD.org
http://lefort.be.eu.org/
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