Bug#854615: ITP: apt-seek -- search for files within Debian packages
Dmitry Bogatov:
>
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Dmitry Bogatov <KAction@gnu.org>
>
> * Package name : apt-seek
> Version : 0.1
> Upstream Author : Dmitry Bogatov <KAction@gnu.org>
> * Url : https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/kaction-guest/apt-seek.git
> * Licenses : GPL-3+
> Programming Lang : C
> Section : admin
>
> apt-seek is a command line tool for searching files contained in
> packages for the APT packaging system. You can search in which
> package a file is included.
> .
> Unlike apt-file program, apt-seek uses constant database to
> significantly speed-up search, at expense of regular expression
> search possibility.
>
> I plan to maintain this package myself, keeping debianization in following
> Git repository:
>
> https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/kaction-guest/apt-seek.git
>
Hi,
I would be happy to see this reduced search indices be part of apt-file
eventually. It would hopefully enable other packages (like
command-not-found and the Perl team's dh-make variant) to reuse apt-file
(or its replacement) to search through optimised indices.
A couple of remarks about the upstream code. Please consider using
apt's fetch system to download Contents files. A couple of items where
the download falls short:
* Non-trivial supports like mirror:// or tor+http(s)://
* It does not support alternative mirror layouts (e.g. Ubuntu and
Debian disagrees on the location of Contents)
* It does not support APT's proxying
* It does not verify downloads (admittedly, a very minor issue)
* It does not support the compression from APT (e.g. if a mirror want
to provide the files uncompressed or .xz compressed)
* It does not support PDiffs for updates
* It does not automatically fetch Contents-all if the archive
moved the "arch:all" files into Contents-all. I will actively push
for this in buster (to reduce download sizes - notably of PDiffs)
(see #649882)
Thanks,
~Niels
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