Re: Equivalent packages between Linux distributions
Hi there!
I'm the developer of Listaller, a cross-distro software installer/manager
and therefore also interested in this topic, as it is one of the major
technical problems which are currently not solved very well :)
Unfortunately I couldn't attend the AppInstaller meeting. (I wanted to,
but couldn't take the time off)
On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:02:07 +0100, Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 10:54:44AM +1100, Silvio Cesare wrote:
>
>> I have generated a list of roughly equivalent packages between Linux
>> distributions (currently Debian 5 and Fedora 13). The list is
>> automatically generated.
> [...]
> [...]
> The main use case we have in mind is to be able to fall back on other
> distros when a package doesn't have some piece of information. For
> example:
>
> - does package $foo have a screenshot in Debian?
> - if no, how about in Fedora?
> - if no, how about in OpenSUSE?
> - if no, how about in Mandriva?
>
> The example uses screenshots, but it could be other kinds of metadata,
> like categories (it's a way for example to port at least some of Debtags
> to other distros), ratings or user comments.
Yeah, especially the Debtags would be extremely valuable!
> The heuristics I've been implementing so far are:
>
> - trivial package name matching
> - 'stemming' specific kinds of package names (debian:lifoo-dev->foo;
> fedora:foo-devel->foo)
> - matching packages that contain the same .desktop files or the same
> pkg-config files
> - similarity matching of file lists
I to _exactly_ the same at time! I compare data from Sophie (
http://sophie.zarb.org/ ) and UDD (mostly similar files and names) and then
cache the data in a SQLite DB.
> I still don't have results because the implementation is not complete,
> but I should have something in a day or two. You have something *today*,
> which is, wow. Tomorrow (Friday) I'll download your dataset and try to
> add another euristic that just uses it. It'll also be interesting to use
> all these methods to cross-validate each other.
Although I don't have much time at time, I'm interested in helping... (But
I have two other projects which take priority...)
How can I get some more information about the project, and is there a
possibility to add some more, extended data, which is not directly required
to fetch meta-data? (Then I could drop my own implementation of
"PackageCompare")
Kind regards
Matthias Klumpp
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