In the tradition of the "Windows Secrets" series of books, I bring you Fink
Secrets!
After years of meticulous research and painstaking reverse-engineering, I
will now
expose Fink's undocumented APIs and hidden features!
(I'm not criticizing the fink maintainers; I'm just being silly. Maybe I'll
add this stuff to the
code/docs itself and submit it. :-} Of course, everything here is subject
to correction by
those who are more familiar.
Here are the command-line fink commands that don't appear in the man page
nor the fink --help
output.
bootstrap : Appears to reinstall the entire distribution from scratch.
Indeed,
bootstrap.sh eventually runs the same code as 'fink
bootstrap'.
scanpackages : Some kind of synchronization. I know it has been discussed
here several times,
but I've never seen a formal definition. The best
description I've seen is here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03062.html
list : Yes, this is mentioned in the man page. But what
isn't
described in the man page,
nor 'fink --help', is that this too has options. Run
'fink
list --help' and be pleasantly
surprised. For example, try 'fink list --section=sci'
listpackages : Simply produces a one-column list of packages with YES/NO
indicating whether
it's installed. Output looks like this:
...
zsh
NO
gdbm-shlibs
YES
lcms-shlibs
NO
gtk+2
YES
...
selfupdate-finish : updates essential packages like apt (selfupdate &
selfupdate-cvs call this
function anyway)
rescan : ??? I can't determine without studying the code much more
closely. Perhaps a
developer can answer?
check (alias: validate) : examines .info files; a sort of integrity/sanity
check
(not to be taken as a secure verification, such as an
MD5 hash)
I guess one can say this checks for proper
finkification ... :)
From the code, fink-0.4.0a-full/perlmod/Validation.pm, lines 145-162
# Should check/verifies the following in .info files:
# + the filename matches %f.info
# + patch file is present
# + all required fields are present
# + warn if obsolete fields are encountered
# + warn about missing Description/Maintainer/License fields
# + warn about overlong Description fields
# + warn about Description starting with "A" or "An" or containing the
package name
# + warn if boolean fields contain bogus values
# + warn if fields seem to contain the package name/version, and
suggest %n/%v should be used
# (excluded from this are fields like Description, Homepage etc.)
# + warn if unknown fields are encountered
#
# TODO: Optionally, should sort the fields to the recommended field order
# - error if format is violated (e.g. bad here-doc)
# - warn if /sw is hardcoded somewhere
# - if type is bundle/nosource - warn about usage of "Source" etc.
# ... other things, make suggestions ;)
From line 345
# Check a given .deb file for standard compliance
#
# - usage of non-recommended directories (/sw/src, /sw/man, /sw/info,
/sw/doc, /sw/libexec, /sw/lib/locale)
# - usage of other non-standard subdirs
# - ideas?
As far as I can tell, this rounds out fink's full command-line feature set.
Good night!
Ken Engel
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