a coprehensive searcheable ports list?

[Emmanuel Hainry]

Citando Kevin Ballard :
> If you want to find ports that provide a specific file, there's no
> way of doing that without having installed the port yet. If you've
> installed a port you can ask what port provides a given file on disk,
> but MacPorts does not know what files a given port will provide until
> it's installed.
> 

Is it planned as a feature request for macports at a point in the future
to provide such a mechanism (as debian or pkgsrc whose packages contain
a plist mentioning all the files to be included) ?  This feature would
be interesting to have for example on the website, and as an addon to
the provides action of port.

However, it requires macports to become deterministic... At the moment,
if you install the same packages on two identic machines, you can obtain
different files installed depending on the order in which the packages
are installed (for example, installing flac before libsndfile makes
libsndfile compile with flac support). I find this undeterministic
behaviour to be a good thing: it makes it possible for some ports to
take into account some particular libraries I have made personal
portfiles for without requiring to edit the portfiles of every
dependents programs, but it makes the updating a bit hazardous.

Emmanuel
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