Package: ftp.debian.org Severity: wishlist For tools such as command-not-found, we need to know which commands a package provides. We currently provide update-command-not-found which downloads and processes Contents files due to ftpmaster request, but I think that this solution is not good enough due to the following things:
(a) Contents files require much space on the disk
(b) Parsing Contents files is not exactly fast
(c) Users have to manually update the data, or there needs to
be a cron job
(d) Due to (c), the package is unusable after direct installation
without first fetching Contents files
I propose that we add a new field called Commands (or whatever you
want) that provides a list of all commands a package provides in
the standard (root) path ({/usr,}/{s,}bin and /usr/games, although
the first ones are most important) with their basenames.
Example:
Package: apt
Commands: apt-get, apt-config, apt-mark, apt-cdrom, apt-cache, apt-key
We could then use that information directly and potentially add
command-not-found support to APT itself (once we break ABI), which
means one package less in the archive :)
The needed information can be found in bin_contents.file, but we
may want to allow packages to override the field themselves, as
bin_contents.file does not deal with alternatives and other
things done in maintainer scripts, maintainers of such packages
could then manually maintain the field with alternatives, or
the maintainer-supplied value could be merged with the value
extracted from projectb.
--
Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member
See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
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