Pierre!
Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
Absolutely. Adding this to the package record manually is a
maintenance
nightmare. It's data that can be trivially auto-generated (ls
…/{,s}bin,
basically), and storing it in-line takes up too much screen and
mind space for
my taste.
"Program names" might even be too limited, if not too
shortsighted. At the end
of the day, programs are not necessarily stored in /bin/. More
importantly,
users don't necessarily look for programs, they could very well
be looking for a
library.
Oh, sure, {,s}bin was just an example. I don't really think
there's a package manager that indexes only those two directories.
'T would be silly.
Extending the search with file listings might result in too much
noise, so
instead we could have a separate command. "guix which" for
instance, as
Or ‘guix where’ or guix whatever.
(16 days left for someone to implement ‘guix whatever’.)
suggested Tobias, but since we are not just talking about
executables, maybe
"guix filesearch" would be more appropriate.
Well, we can deathmatch about the name and the number of hyphens
once it does something. ;-)
I haven't though through the details, but I am under the
impression that the
file listing could be retrieve with the same mechanism as "guix
size", i.e. from
the substitute index. I think it would work well on the build
farm, without
more complexity than just another entry to the substitute index.
What do you mean by substitute index?
By complexity, I meant: if it would depend on a network connection
to the build farm (or elsewhere), at all.
And would this information be provided by a naked ‘guix publish’?
I guess that depends on the meaning of ‘substitute index’.
Kind regards,
T G-R
