How do I search inside long descriptions

[Randall Wood]

If you install the Pallet port, it provides a not-really working tool  
to manage ports, but it does work to search long descriptions,  
categories, descriptions, as well as port names.

On 19 Jun 2007, at 05:08, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On Jun 19, 2007, at 02:18, Malcolm Fitzgerald wrote:
>
>> On 19/06/2007, at 4:35 PM, paul beard wrote:
>>
>>> On Jun 18, 2007, at 11:30 PM, Malcolm Fitzgerald wrote:
>>>
>>>> The words "known-good port" represent the blank that I'm trying  
>>>> to fill. I want to be able to search for text inside the port's  
>>>> long-description. I'd like to discover the "known-good"  
>>>> spreadsheets, etc that are in MacPorts. At present I have to go  
>>>> to the the freebsd ports web site, search there, then see if any  
>>>> of the ports that I've found are available in MacPorts.
>>>
>>> Yeah, I missed that in your question somehow.
>>>
>>> Might be worth just dumping a list and seeing if you recognize  
>>> any, assuming you're familiar with some of the names.
>>
>> Well, that's half the problem. I'd like to be able to explore and  
>> discover new things.
>
> In lieu of a MacPorts command to do this, since there isn't one  
> that I know of, you could grep the entire text of all the  
> portfiles. This won't work well if the string you're searching for  
> is a language keyword, MacPorts category, username or other text  
> that appears in many portfiles, but for example for "spreadsheet"  
> it gives this:
>
> $ grep 'spreadsheet' */*/Portfile
> gnome/gnumeric/Portfile:description     A spreadsheet with gnome  
> support.
> gnome/gnumeric/Portfile:long_description        A spreadsheet with  
> gnome support.
> math/oleo/Portfile:description                  Lightweight  
> spreadsheet program
> math/oleo/Portfile:     GNU Oleo is a spreadsheet program with the  
> following features: \
> math/oleo/Portfile:     Charts generated from spreadsheet data  
> (interface is not yet stable, \
> perl/p5-sql-translator/ 
> Portfile:                                        port:p5-io-stringy  
> port:p5-spreadsheet-parseexcel \
> python/py-xlrd/Portfile:description             module to extract  
> data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files
> python/py-xlrd/Portfile:                        Excel spreadsheet  
> files.
> python/py-xlwriter/Portfile:description         python module for  
> writing Excel spreadsheets
> python/py-xlwriter/Portfile:                             
> spreadsheets. It is a port of John McNamara's Perl \
> python/py-xlwriter/Portfile:                            It allows  
> writing of Excel spreadsheets without the \
> textproc/catdoc/Portfile:                converts Excel spreadsheet  
> into comma-separated value \
> www/autobench/Portfile:    spreadsheet for analysis/graphing.
> x11/siag/Portfile:                      It consists of the  
> spreadsheet Siag, the word processor PW, \
>
> Run this in your ports tree directory. If you don't know where that  
> is, one way to get to it is like this:
>
> cd `port dir e`/../..
>
> There's probably a better way to do that but that works. Then, if  
> your grep turns up something interesting, you can of course learn  
> more about the port with "port info <PORTNAME>".
>
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Randall Wood
rhwood at mac.com
http://shyramblings.blogspot.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.  
All the
rest is just philosophy."