On 10 Jun 2000, Andreas Voegele wrote:
> >> In my opinion, packages like "pygtk" and "pyqt" that add new
> >> modules to Python should always be renamed to "python-*" [...]
>
> > [...]
>
> > As far as finding stuff in dselect goes... try "/".
>
> That is what I'm doing. But dselect does only support simple substring
> searches and when I'm searching for "py" I find packages like "happy"
> or "floppybackup" which I'm not interested in.
Good point.
> > I think it would be much more difficult to find Debianized
> > packages if they had a different name than what the author
> > originally gave them,
>
> That's only true if you know the upstream package's name. Quite often
> I want to find out if there's already a module that provides some
> functionality I need, and then I browse through the descriptions of
> the packages beginning with "python-".
Hmmm, ok. I find that I am usually looking to see if some module
mentioned in a doc|message|website has been Debianized, and end up using
the form at .../distrib/packages to do a search.
I've been kicking around an idea that would both solve this problem and
enhance Debian[1]... how about having an index of all Python related
packages, everything that depends on python-base. It should be trivial
to generate this list automatically (on demand or daily) using the same
process that generates the web based package trees; it would probably
make more sense to divide the list into Python versions, instead of
stable(/frozen)/unstable. The end result would be a python.html page
that operated like the web based package trees, the tough bit (?) would
be taking it offline. I mentioned something similar to Jay T. awhile
back (IIRC, it did appear on debian-www), he didn't think it was worth
the effort since the task-python-* packages provided much of the same
information; the problem with using the task packages to get at this
information is that it would be a major PITA to keep the task packages
uptodate for 2 or 3 distributions.
later,
Bruce
[1] - There could be Python, C, C++, Icon, Fortran, PHP?, etc. pages; a
good resource for programmers wanting to see what Debian offers, without
the error prone hassle of searching through the whole archive when you
may not know exactly what you are looking for.
