On Thursday 02 November 2006 12:36, Mgr. Peter Tuharsky wrote:
Hi all
Hello,
Sometimes I spend hours just reading Debian's package repository, and
everytime I found interesting packages. The Debian is extremely large
and juicy, but in contrary, it is really difficult sometimes to just
find the right tool when needed.
Debian also has lots of lots of tools for package searching ;-) In fact I
believe Debian has the most advanced searching tools amongst the operating
systems. As others already suggested debtags, I can merely add that
packagesearch (this is a package) can make use of debtags too. You may also
want to try dctrl-tools.
More and more, I miss some more accurate system for package classification.
For example, just the cathegories X11 and GNOME both contain bunch
of excellent software of many kinds. The same goes for other cathegories
too -sound, video,...
New sub-cathegories should be created, such as: video_editing,
video_players, sound_editing, sound_players, sound_conversion,
sound_tools, mp3_tools, cd_creation, digital_camera, image_viewers,
image_editors (possibly with bitmap and vector subcathegories), laptop,
electronics, chemistry, astronomy, math, physics, junior, school..
Ahem, debtags.
Independently, packages should also bear some flag, whether they are
commandline-based, or X11, or GNOME, or KDE. So that I could for example
find package for video editing, for GNOME.
Even other package flags could be independent, so that search would not
be just tree-oriended, but multi-dimensional instead. For example,
if I need sound editing program for kids that runs under GNOME.
Allow me to introduce you to the package of ara. You can do boolean regexp
queries against all/any package's field known to the Debian packaging system.
Here is a fairly complex example:
ara -fields Package:8,Size,Description:100 -table 'section=games
!depends:(gtk|sdl|kde|opengl|gnome)
!description:(/shoot|kill|destroy|blast|race|bomb/iw |
/multi\(-\|\)player\|strategy\|conquest\|3\(-\|\)d/iw)
depends:(xlibs|vga) !size100'
Assuming a 125-column display, display the first eight characters of the
package name, the size in bytes, and the first hundred characters of the
description of all packages in the games section not exceeding one
million bytes, not depending on fancy stuff like gtk,SDL,KDE,OpenGL or
Gnome, not mentioning some forms of violence (to shoot, to kill, etc.)
in its description, not described as multi-player, strategy, conquest or
three-dimensional games, yet depending on either xlibs or svga to exclude
console-based games.
Please see ara -examples and ara(1) for more.
Sometimes I'd like to give Debian a try for a new user, and such a
system would help greatly to find the proper applications for him.
Sometimes I need a commandline tool for server. Again, would help much.
Ara has a command line tool (including interactive mode), a GTK2-based GUI
(apt-get install ara xara-gtk) and a web interface (the Tag field is explored
of course) - http://ara.edos-project.org/
I think, it shouldn't be too hard to implement that. Just create the
structure in apt and let the package maintainers to set the few new
flags for the packages.
You are alluding the Tag: field, but it is just one of them and you can
explore any/all of them if you need to.
I'm sure something like that has already been discussed. I'm just
adding, that such kind of structure is NECESSARRY for such a great
software collection as Debian is.
Well, since there are already some package searching tools, you might want to
file wishlist bugs against them if you find something useful which has not
been implemented yet.
P.S. Anyway, I can understand your chicken-and-egg problem, you were missing
the searching tools to find your favorite searching tool ;-)
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