[arch-dev-public] Filename search for Arch

[Thomas Bächler]

It is a much requested feature: Someone wants to search for a filename
and get a package name, and there is no possibility in Arch.

I have scripts to generate filelists from the package files which could
run once a day or so. However, cactus (after a short jabber discussion)
disagress with me on how the search would be done:

My suggestion:
Create a script on the webserver that "greps" through the prepared
filelists or searches a sql database, then gives you a machine-readable
output via xml or json that can be displayed in a client (for example a
'pacman -So' option).
However, cactus thinks that this would put too much load on the server.

Another possibility: Make the filelists available for (optional)
download and search them offline (with pacman or another tool). My
problem here is:
total 140M
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users  35M Jan 21 17:06 filelist.community-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users  34M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.community-x86_64
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.6M Jan 21 16:52 filelist.core-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.6M Jan 21 16:52 filelist.core-x86_64
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users  32M Jan 21 16:57 filelist.extra-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users  32M Jan 21 17:02 filelist.extra-x86_64
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 2.1M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.testing-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 2.0M Jan 21 17:12 filelist.testing-x86_64
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 1.2M Jan 21 17:11 filelist.unstable-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas users 673K Jan 21 17:11 filelist.unstable-x86_64

Which is 8.9MB compressed with bz2, a lot to download if you have to
update the lists every day to have an up-to-date version.

What do you guys think?

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