From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 27 14:06:44 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A656C16A4CE for ; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:06:44 +0000 (GMT) Received: from mail.seekingfire.com (coyote.seekingfire.com [24.72.10.212]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 38D2443D55 for ; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:06:44 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from tillman@seekingfire.com) Received: by mail.seekingfire.com (Postfix, from userid 500) id 7774654E; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:06:42 -0600 (CST) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:06:42 -0600 From: Tillman Hodgson To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20041027140642.GB94897@seekingfire.com> References: <20041022074529.GN10363@k7.mavetju> <200410262153.22929.matt@fruitsalad.org> <20041026200121.GS94897@seekingfire.com> <200410270412.59142.benlutz@datacomm.ch> <20041027031306.GX94897@seekingfire.com> <20041027081741.GA72488@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20041027081741.GA72488@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> X-Habeas-SWE-1: winter into spring X-Habeas-SWE-2: brightly anticipated X-Habeas-SWE-3: like Habeas SWE (tm) X-Habeas-SWE-4: Copyright 2002 Habeas (tm) X-Habeas-SWE-5: Sender Warranted Email (SWE) (tm). The sender of this X-Habeas-SWE-6: email in exchange for a license for this Habeas X-Habeas-SWE-7: warrant mark warrants that this is a Habeas Compliant X-Habeas-SWE-8: Message (HCM) and not spam. Please report use of this X-Habeas-SWE-9: mark in spam to . X-GPG-Key-ID: 828AFC7B X-GPG-Fingerprint: 5584 14BA C9EB 1524 0E68 F543 0F0A 7FBC 828A FC7B X-GPG-Key: http://www.seekingfire.com/gpg_key.asc X-Urban-Legend: There is lots of hidden information in headers User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i Subject: Re: ports/www is too full X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:06:44 -0000 On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:17:41AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote: > About the only way I can see for doing this task effectively would be > a google-like keyword search over the contents of the pkg-descr files. > The pkg-descr files generally contain a pretty good summary of what > the port actually contains -- much better than just relying on port > names. Hmmmm... it should be possible to hook up htDig indexing the > README.html files. It would be better, yes, but it would still be playing "hunt the keyword in the stack of 12000 pkg-descrs". If you picked a good keyword you get 200 hits and still have to browse through them. If you pick a bad keyword, you get no hits. Perhaps if pkg-descr had a KEYWORDS: line and it's use was considered mandatory ... but what are the chances that every port maintainers idea of a keyword is the same as mine? I think meta-information like fine-grained categories are different than searching. > Although did you just try typing in 'apache modules' into the search > facility right on the http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ page? You can > even tell it to just search the package descriptions. Oh, I agree that there are tools out there that do very cool things with the ports tree. I'm a regular spelunker (love that word) at freshports.org. That's not exactly part of the FreeBSD tool set on a non-networked machine though, so I don't think it's _directly_ relevant to this discussion. I'm not even advocating the use of finely-grained categories. I'm just pointing out that searching is not the same as browsing :-). I wouldn't use Google to select the right chapter of the Handbook to read--I'd use the table of contents. Searching is useful, and it's very important and thus worth spending time getting right, but it's a different tool for a different (albeit related) task. Here's a better example: Let's say that rather than being the maintainer of the net/latd port, I'm some random user who wants the `llogin` program. So I `cd /usr/ports && make search key=llogin`. But there's no hits. There's 989 ports in the net/ category. Searching failed. Browsing that directory for the port I want is very difficult. But if there was, say, a dozen sub-categories my task becomes manageable. Maybe in the net/other-protocols (or whatever) category there's only a score of ports. Maybe the name "latd" then rings a bell. Granted, the ability to search pkg-plist would solve this particular issue. It's easy to find examples where that won't work: if I just want to see what neat kinds of network protocols that FreeBSD has supported in it's ports tree, for example. -T -- Page 41: Two of the most important Unix traditions are to share and to help people. - Harley Hahn, _The Unix Companion_