My interactive version of pkg_add

[Marin Atanasov]

Hello everyone! :)

I have a program I wrote 1 or 2 days ago for a friend who was asking about
how to make pkg_add install a package from a specific local path and if
the package is not there then pkg_add should install it remotely (using
the -r option). Of course this is not a new pkg_add version - it's just an
interactive interface which uses pkg_add (pkg_info, pkg_delete could also
be used - in next version) to install a specific package.

The idea about the program is that you don't have to know the full name of
the package - you just choose a path to scan and a pattern, and the
program returns all matching entries of pattern, so this way you could
interactively choose which package to install.

I have some ideas in my mind which could be added to the program's
features. I am writing to you to find out will such a program would be
useful and worth improving it?

This is what I am planning to add as features in the next version
(suggestions are welcome):
-- Command Line Options(CLO) like (add, delete, info) allowing the program
to invoke a different pkg_* command and perform the action upon the chosen
package
-- CLO which tells the program to scan PKG_PATH first and then the
specified directory
-- an option to interactively set PACKAGEROOT and PACKAGESITE env vars if
they have not been set already in order to search PACKAGEROOT and
PACKAGESITE if no single matching pattern was found in the local path

-- Some guys from DaemonForums suggested that I could write a function
which does exactly what the local scan function does, but for an FTP
server - recursively searching an FTP server for a given pattern of a
package.

It doesn't have an official name already - so I named it smart_add - just
for now :)

Anyway, a screenshot of the program is available here:
http://www.unix-heaven.org/doc/smartadd.png

And here's the code of the program:
http://www.unix-heaven.org/doc/smartadd.tar.gz

So what do you think - is it worth improving upon it or it's a waste of time?
Thanks for any suggestions.


-- 
Marin Atanasov a.k.a DNAeon
dnaeon AT gmail DOT com
daemon AT unix-heaven DOT org