Bug 9938

Summary:	Richer ebuild metadata
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Ashvin Mysore <ashvin>
Component:	Documentation	Assignee:	Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) <drobbins>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	High
Version:	2.0
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Ashvin Mysore 2002-10-29 21:16:55 UTC

It would be very convenient if ebuilds could provide richer metadata, in terms
of what functionality is provided by the package. The current DESCRIPTION field
is quite useful in conjunction with emerge search. However, an admin wanting to
know, for example, what to emerge in order to get kibitz is left in the dark. If
the expect ebuild could contain a line along the lines of,

  # Commands, libraries, and header files provided by the package.
  PROVIDES="rftp dislocate xkibitz kibitz ... libexpect5.37.a expect.h ..."

her task would be made much easier.

PROVIDES wouldn't contain *every* file provided by the package, just the ones
with which a user would interface (as a rule, anything installed into /usr/bin,
/usr/lib, or /usr/include, or the /opt equivalents, unless there's a very good
reason not to).

Querying for data in PROVIDES fields could either be added to emerge's search
directive, made into a new searchprovides directive, or possibly both (with
searchprovides returning *only* information from PROVIDES).

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2002-10-30 08:29:08 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2905 ***