[MacPorts] #51664: Please add pseudo-portnames for some common programs

[Rainer Müller]

On 2016-07-01 12:15, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On Jun 30, 2016, at 7:25 AM, Rainer Müller wrote:
>>
>> Even with that, the proposal would not work for everything. There is no
>> port that provides a 'python' binary. The GNU coreutils are provided
>> with a 'g' prefix, in order not to override standard system utils by
>> default. Searching for the binary name here will not return any results.
> 
> Well it would if it were a substring or regexp search, as I think it is now for the other fields...

I don't think a substring search will be specific enough in the general
case. I understood that the binary name was supposed to narrow the
result set down to only one port that is then installed.

Anyway, in order to let 'port install' suggest candidates or
alternatives based on binary names, we first need a database of port
contents.

This use case would be an example what such an index could be used for.
I would also say that makes it a good case for including such a database
in the ports tree (PackageIndex similar to PortIndex?).

Rainer