Search the contents of (all) ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 26, 2010, at 07:06, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2010-6-26 21:58 , Andreas Wilm wrote:
>> I was wondering if there is a way to search the contents of all ports,
>> i.e. also not installed ports. Ideally such a list would contain only
>> files that are actually installable and exclude the source files.
>> Something like Debian's apt-file for ports or a web-frontend like
>> http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
>> 
>> Background is that I found myself in a situation where I was looking
>> for a certain latex class and had no idea which port to install.
> 
> This would obviously be useful, but implementing it requires someone to
> first compile a list of the contents of all available ports. To see the
> contents of a port, you first have to build it.
> 
> Once there's a list, someone has to implement a way to let users query it.


This is complicated by the fact that a port might install a different set of files for any number of reasons -- for example because of what variants are selected, or what OS version or processor architecture is used, or even what other ports are installed (this last should not be the case, but sometimes is through oversight).

Probably we need to get binary distributions working first, via MPAB. If we had all that done, with a build server building and packaging ports for distribution, it would be easy to have it also keep a manifest of what got installed for each port (a separate list for each set of variants, processor arch and OS version (for however many processor arch and OS version combinations we end up supporting binary builds for (i.e. possibly just x86_64 Snow Leopard))).