[BRAINSTORMING] simplifying maintainer's life

[Marcus von Appen]

Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org>:

> On 04/09/2014 07:00, Marcus von Appen wrote:
>>> - I often grep all plists to find which port could possibly provide such
>>> >   header or such library (among non-installed ports, of course).
>
>> I do the same, but would argue that such a query service should belong to or
>> offered by a pkg search (as sort of counterpart to pkg which).
>
> We've toyed with that idea -- allowing 'pkg search' or similar to search
> on any file in any package known in the repositories.  The biggest
> problem is that including all that data in the package catalogues would
> bloat their size by a very large amount.
>
> Rather than bloating the catalogues for any use, there was a separate
> index of files.  Not sure whether that's being routinely built on the
> FreeBSD pkg cluster at the moment  -- probably not, as it was only ever
> experimental, and didn't have any generally available consumers.

I did not mean it to be offline available, since it becomes outdated too fast.

> In many ways, I'd prefer to have this sort of functionality available as
> a web-app, thus saving users the necessity of downloading megabytes of
> data about ports / packages they would never use or care about.  Needs
> someone to step up and write that application though.

Not necessarily a web app, but a (web) service that's e.g. run somewhere on a
pkg builder or proxy and which can be queried by tools as well as web  
services.

If you tell me, how the index looks like, I can give it a quick  
(prototyping) shot.

Cheers
Marcus