AFAIK, unfortunately, there's no simple way - i.e., there's no general way - to answer
the question, "what does a package provide?", prior to fully installing it first and
finding out by hand.
For example 1, let's say I want to find out what is provided by fileutils.
fink info fileutils
gives me a description, "...This includes stuff like ls, mkdir, cp, rm, chmod and touch."
You must go to the web page http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/fileutils.html
to see a comprehensive list.
For example 2,
fink info macosx-file-pm
...well, as you have observed, there's no way to tell except for searching on CPAN and
examining the package yourself.
This is a documentation problem in general, and beyond fink's scope, I think.
Off-topic Question (i.e., not directly related to fink) : is anyone, particularly any of you
developers, aware of a documentation standardization effort among any of the package
managing entities - Debian, DarwinPorts, RPM, etc.? I would think by now someone has
thought of these two problems of package meta-data:
1. These different entities' tools and methods are not terribly interoperable. (I know I'm
not the only one to observe that Fink and GNU-Darwin do not coexist well).
2. Packages of different types - such as a perl modules, command-line utilities, libraries -
have varying degrees and methods of self-documentation.
Disclaimer: The above statements reflect only my opinion and limited education. Someone here may be/is probably more enlightened than I. :}
Thank you
Ken
On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 02:49 PM, Kow K wrote:
On Wednesday, Dec 18, 2002, at 14:22 US/Pacific, Martin Costabel wrote:I have a quick question related to this. How can end-users like me know what tools/modules are provided in a package? For example, fink info macosx-file-pm returns:Jonathan Bell wrote:I can recommend Psync http://www.dan.co.jp/cases/macosx/psync.html..which is also avialable from Fink in the macosx-file-pm package.
macosx-file-pm-0.64-1: Collection of modules to manipulate files on MacOS X
.
Web site: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MacOSX-File
.
Maintainer: Jeffrey Whitaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I don't see any mention of psync ... Generally, I can figure out what is REALLY provided by a package.
I wish if I could figure out exactly what tools/modules are going to be provided. Is there any such functionality with Fink already?
This is one of a few useful features that I would like to see in the future release of Fink, if it doesn't have it yet.
Cheers,
Kow
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