David Powell wrote:
Brock Pytlik wrote:
I find that assessment a little strange, since ultimately people
aren't using computers to install software, they are using computers
to use software. Once the software they need is installed searches
will primarily be local searches. To state it differently, remote
searches represent a fixed cost, whereas local searches represent an
ongoing cost.
I agree remote searches are very important -- possibly more important
than local searches -- but that doesn't mean local searches are rare
or negligible.
Dave
Help me understand the use case for frequent local search that I'm
not seeing... Once the software is installed on your machine, why are
you searching for it?
I do it often as a user. I know a piece of software is installed on
my system, but for the life of me I can't figure out where it is. Or
a command I trying to use came with non-man documentation, and I was
hoping to avoid manually checking all 300 different places software
if its ilk typically dump such stuff.
I do it often as a FOSS consumer. The software I just downloaded and
tried to ./configure has found the wrong version of some library (or
didn't find it all all), and I want to find where the right libraries
are. The same situation arise with commands and datafiles.
And as a developer, I often turn to a search of installed software to
look for established examples. Ideally the proper way to do
everything would be explicitly documented and that documentation
would be easy to find, but often neither is the case.
This isn't some gedanken experiment. I do queries like this fairly
often. I have a well-worn wrapper around grep and
/var/adm/install/contents that I was *really* hoping pkg would
obviate. Perhaps I should be using something like slocate instead,
but when we already have a database that incorporates all the
information I need -- including metadata that slocate doesn't include
-- that just seems silly. I shouldn't have to maintain a second
packaging database.
Dave
Thanks for articulating these, these were the kinds of examples I was
looking for.
For my own clarity, other than the speed, are there ways that pkg search
are not currently meeting your needs (at least in replacing grep
/var/.../contents)?
Brock
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