On Monday 21 February 2005 06:08 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > It seems so silly but the trouble is that these words are so common that > any sort of searching turns up hundreds of things I'm not looking for. > > Did I say hundreds? I mean millions. > > I'm looking for the old Unix "spell" and "look" command line tools. What > gentoo package has these?
I'm not answering this question, but rather expounding on it. In may cases a user may know what command (or file) they want but don't have any idea what category or package gentoo has placed it's provider. AFAIK, there's no way to ask portage this type of question, if there is: how? Is an enchanment to portage for this functionality in the works; maybe a GLEP? I understand there are difficulties to this type of indexing in gentoo (use flags; other types of conditions in ebuilds [like has_nptl]; etc.) but I'm sure it's possible, can any portage experts or gentoo-devs weigh in on this? It seems to me that you could "simulate" an installation, record the use flags on (well, basically anything in emerge --info) and the files / commands created, throw that into a database and give out meaningful information. This could either be done with some type of hetrogenous compile farm on the gentoo end or if simulation tools are "good enough" [1] on a single machine. I understand that since ebuilds can branch on arbitrary conditions and, even if the ebuild doesn't branch, configure can cause different files to be compiles, indexes may not be completely accurate, but they might help. [Alternatively, at least for common commands, this could simply be handled by a large number of virtuals like virtual/<command>-command (E.g. virtual/spell-command).] -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy [1] For example, some/many/most/all simply scan the command line and touch a few files, instead of doing any complex processing. -- [email protected] mailing list
