[gentoo-user] Re: why gentoo doesn't have long description?

[Moshe Kaminsky <kaminsky@math.huji.ac.il>]

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* Fernando Canizo <conan@lugmen.org.ar> [24/08/05 14:07]:
> 
> El 24/ago/2005 a las 04:01 -0300, Jonas me decía:
> > >Second, the whole idea is to do this for non-connected systems. Meaning, a
> > >solution not involving the Internet... =)
> > If you're refering to the fact that the person doesn't have an internet 
> > connection when he wants to view this information throught the emerge 
> > interface, then you're wrong. When you want to install or you're just 
> > searching for a package you're using the emerge interface , when you 
> > need more info you have to 1) open your browser 2) type in the url (if 
> > you're lucky you know the url or it's in your browsers cache) 3) search 
> > for the package on the website , while instead you could just do 
> > something like emerge --desc package. Now what's quicker and makes more 
> > sence ?
> 
> Exactly! That's what i'm refering to. It's not an issues of connection it's an
> issue of lazyness! It's like: "-- hey what are you doing this weekend? -- don't
> know, it's cold and raining, i think i'm gonna sit in my throne and check what's
> new on 'app-vim' to improve my vimyness, if find something interesting i'll
> check the package webpage."
> 
> For now i'm using 'questo':
> === script ====
> #!/bin/bash
> # lun may  2 20:57:24 ART 2005
> # conan - GPLed
> #
> # script to check for apps on rainy sunday morning
> 
> BASE_DIR="/usr/portage/"
> 
> [ $# -ne 1 ] && echo "Uso: questo <category>" && exit 0
> 
> cd $BASE_DIR$1
> for package in * ; do
> 	eix "^$paquete\$"
> 	echo "Looking for: $1/$paquete. ENTER to continue..."
> 	read
> done
> === end script ====
> 
> Now i took sugestion from Ciaran to look in metadata.xml, i check a couple by
> hand and see the 'longdesc' field but... with short descriptions! Now maybe i
> just choose two with bad luck, but i got a feeling that gentoo maintainers
> doesn't like to provide longdesc, although there is the posibility.
> 
> I was thinking of doing a little script that gives longdesc found in metadata to
> confirm this, but since i don't know nothing about xml, think it gonna take a
> little bit more that if there were already an application to check 
> 'metadata.xml'

If you have the XML::Simple perl module (which can be emerged as 
XML-Simple), you can do

perl -MXML::Simple -le 'print XMLin(shift)->{"longdescription"}' <file>

where <file> is the metadata.xml file.

However, it appears that this field is not widely supported. Instead, 
you might use something like

lynx -dump -nolist `esearch -o %h <package>`

to dump the homepage of the package as text (of course, you still need 
to be online for that)

Moshe

PS. Sorry if this actually seems on-topic :)


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