portage should provide means to search in the contents of all the packages, have they been installed or not. This could address the following situations: - Discover which package(s) provides a given file in the case it's not installed in the system - Find which other package(s) could provide a file which is installed - Provide means for (partially) checking if the specified dependendies of every package are satisfied (by using ldd and checking if the linked libraries are provided by the specified dependencies in the ebuild) This functionality imposes some implementation problems, since every ebuild should provide something like a 'contents' file specifying the superset of files it could provide (which can vary according with USE flags, for instance), and this may be an unwanted overhead for the portage tree. A possible solution could be to provide a online service running under gentoo.org to allow such queries (in this case a proper backend could run every available ebuild and create a database of files). A similar system exists in Debian, which provides an on-line interface to query for the contents of packages: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents
*** Bug 9938 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 4883 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 15475 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think this would be best suited for gentoo-stats, the client sends the CONTENTS files together with USE/ARCH to the server which analyzes them and calculates probabilities of a given file being in a package. That information could then be queried from the website. Of course it should be completely optional and off by default for privacy and bandwidth reasons.
There's a discussion at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=189584 about implementing such a system ... comments appreciated
(In reply to comment #4) > I think this would be best suited for gentoo-stats, the client sends the CONTENTS files together with USE/ARCH to the server which analyzes them and calculates probabilities of a given file being in a package. That information could then be queried from the website. > Of course it should be completely optional and off by default for privacy and bandwidth reasons. FYI, the gentoo-stats project died.
well, i think whenever it reappears it would be a good idea to implement (again) :-)
> - Discover which package(s) provides a given file in the case it's not installed in the system > - Find which other package(s) could provide a file which is installed We have a tool for such thing in tree (`emerge pfl && e-file someFileHere`) so I assume there is no longer need for such thing to be implemented. > - Provide means for (partially) checking if the specified dependendies of every package are satisfied (by using ldd and checking if the linked libraries are provided by the specified dependencies in the ebuild) This is very simple to implement in bash (just grep the NEEDED entries, enumerate them through `equery b` and `e-file` to tell whether they are present and if not tell which package we need to depend on), furthermore it is irrelevant to the "implementation problem" you refer to. So, I ask the maintainers, do we still have a need to reinvent the wheel here?
@Portage Tools Team: Ping. If you think `e-file ...` from app-portage/pfl covers this, then please close this bug and remove bug #472746 from Blocks; thanks. If not, feel free to see this message as a subtle reminder for this idea...
