Right now, the only way to see the package description/url is through emerge -s (I think), which'll actually take a long time sometimes, however, wouldn't it be able to implement an option that'll only give the information of exactly the package you request. For example, emerge -s xmms gives me a laundry list full of packages containing xmms in their name, where I need to search for xmms in it, while I only need the URL for xmms itself. An example (if -w where to be the option I suggest): # emerge -w xmms * media-sound/xmms Latest version available: 1.2.7-r20 Latest version installed: 1.2.7-r20 Size of downloaded files: 2,808 kB Homepage: http://www.xmms.org/ Description: X MultiMedia System # And that would be it :-) I'm sorry if this allready been suggested or discussed, or if this is a dup, but I couldn't find anything about it.
You might be interested in epm. Specifically, epm -qi xmms might give you enough information (not in this particular case, but in general).
Michael sent me a patch offline for epm to make it show the URL when called with -qi. This is now in the portage tree as 0.8.4. For example, $ epm -qi epm Name : epm Version : 0.8.4 Release : Slot: 0 Install date: Mon May 26 21:37:30 2003 Build Host: i686-pc-linux-gnu Group : sys-apps License: GPL-2 Size : TBD Packager : agriffis URL : http://www.gentoo.org/~agriffis/epm/ Description : rpm workalike for Gentoo Linux This script provides a good way to do this kind of query for installed packages, but it has two drawbacks: 1. It only works for installed packages, not for packages in the portage hierarchy (emerge -s works for packages in the hierarchy); 2. It's not an official part of portage, and I never plan to support it seriously enough to warrant including it with portage. For the most part it duplicates functionality found in the base portage toolset anyway. Nick might be able to tell us if there's another tool that would be more appropriate than epm for general package querying. I don't know what functionality qpkg has since I usually use epm.
It would be nice if emerge could handle this :-) And it's mostly of not yet installed packages that I want the URL or info so I can find out a bit more about it, so epm is not really an option. I had a look at qpkg. qpkg -i xmms also gives me a whole list, and takes a lot longer than emerge to display it. qpkg -i media-sound/xmms is faster and less output, but doesn't really work, since I don't always know which category a package belongs too.
grep -h DESCRIPTION /usr/portage/media-sound/xmms/*.ebuild|uniq grep -h HOMEPAGE /usr/portage/media-sound/xmms/*.ebuild|uniq
emerge -s also supports regular expressions, so if you only want info about xmms use emerge -s ^xmms$ And -s isn't that slow nowadays (most of the time is spent in python/portage initialization), so I close this.
