Re: A rosetta stone of package names?

[Allan Clark]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 21:27, Tim Post <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 15:07 +0100, Richard Ash wrote:
> > > Such a look up table would be priceless, I think :) I have had zero
> luck
> > > in finding one.
> >
> > A compiled table would be large, cumbersome and perennially out of date.
> > What you could do would be to associate each library with it's home page
> > relatively easily (in 99% of cases. A few are orphaned etc, but most
> > have a home on the web somewhere).
> > Armed with that you should be able to search the host distribution's
> > package databases to locate the available packages.
>
> I am working on using Autoconf as a universal installer for GNUPanel, a
> free web hosting control panel.
>
> We have very little code that actually has to be compiled, however we
> depend on several dozen packages that must come from the distribution.
> As we evolve, we'll surely depend on more.
>
> Rather than maintain a version for each distribution, I hope to just
> write macros that output pre-installation scripts.


Sounds more like when you make a plugin available, you also port the
plugged-in module to the target.

Alternatively, to try a slackware-on-the-fly, the URL pattern:

http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/{proj}/{proj}.xml

ie:

http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/apache/apache.xml
http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/nagios/nagios.xml

These seem to reveal URLs which redirect to the actual downloads; some are
populated, some are not.  Dependencies seem sometimes given.  Seems the
maintainer to an enthusiast maintains the accuracy of this data, so it would
be more up-to-date, but not something you can control.  Watch your
User-Agent on these URLs, and cache them locally to be polite :)  (Freshmeat
hosts an RSS which can be parsed to signal an update-event for your cache, I
would recomment that as an feed for QA before Production to maintain
coherence)

I still agree with the other posters that this is a dangerous ( == support
issues and unknown breakage) path to take, but it's all yours, and maybe
you'll show it to be not-so-scary.

Allan
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