Bug 437494 – Provide a parameter for emerge so that 'emerge -pv' can display package description along with other fields.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: UNCONFIRMED ---

[Description trismarck 2012-10-07 09:02:16 UTC]

Please provide a parameter for emerge so that 'emerge -pv' can display package description along with other information about the package. Currently, one needs to either:
- emerge --searchdesc 'packageName' //very slow
- eix //generates a cache, separate package to emerge
- qsearch //generates a cache
It would be more intuitive if emerge just had a special switch for displaying the package's description field.

[Comment 1 Zac Medico 2012-10-07 16:04:48 UTC]

I think emerge --search does what you want, and it's faster than --searchdesc because --search only search the category/package names while --searchdesc searches the DESRIPTION metadata for every single package (very slow).

[Comment 2 trismarck 2012-10-08 19:09:40 UTC]

Hi Zac,

there are two scenarios where I needed this option:
- lets suppose I already know the name of the package. I'd like to display the description field of the package to know more about it
- lets suppose I've found a package with 'emerge --search' (I got lucky / knew the [partial] name of the package). Again, displaying the description field for found package[s] is useful to decide, what package do I really want to use. Note that at this point I already know the category / package name.