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