On Tuesday 09 September 2003 10:19, Brett I.Holcomb wrote: > I know there has been lots of discussion about aspects of this. However, > it appears that qpkg, etcat, and epm just won't do some searches. For > example I want to list the files in cdrtools. > > qpkg - must be installed to do that - but I don't want to install it first! > epm - not supported yet. > etcat files cdrtools - says there are two packages but says "only printing > found installed programs".
Currently, there is no information about what files a package installs under /usr/portage. All the above tools use /var/db/pkg/foo/bar/CONTENTS to find out what files a package installs. This information is gathered at the time the package is installed - and removed when it is uninstalled. > Will these tools ever support none installed packages?? If enough people request it then probably... but it is not the fault of the packages. As I said above, the problem is that the portage tree does not contain the information. Actually, I just did a test. bash-2.05b$ cat `find /var/db/pkg* | grep CONTENTS` > test.data bash-2.05b$ ls -s test.data 18292 test.data bash-2.05b$ gzip test.data bash-2.05b$ ls -s test.data.gz 4652 test.data.gz And that's just for what I've got installed! If that were to be done for the entire portage tree. The data would be in the vicinity of 1gb uncompressed and 250mb over rsync (using the default gzip compression). Looking at that, I doubt you will see ever see this functionality added to portage. > So how do I find out what's in the packages that are not installed - simply > and easily without having to take apart the tarball? Emerge is starting to support and the mirrors are starting to host prebuilt packages. Perhaps you could use those to get a compiled version of the package and check out the contents of that (usually much smaller than the corresponding source). Try: emerge -gKf foo/bar and then look into the downloaded tbz in /usr/portage/packages/foo/bar. Jason -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list