Simple question: how do I list the description of packages

blais · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 57

Been using gentoo for a few years. I still haven't got a nice solution for this simple query, other than cd'ing into the portage tree and cat'ing the ebuild files by hand and grepping. I'm annoyed.

I want to get the description of a list of packages, e.g.:

<some command> <package> [<package> ...]

- I don't want it to have to search, the package name is complete, it should be fast
- I want only a short one-liner description of what the package does.

Reading the man pages of portage, emerge, equery and others, there is nothing obvious that seem to be able to do that

- emerge --search won't accept a full package name,
- emerge --info does not include the description
- equery list does not include the description
- portageq does not seem able to get this
- I looked at the other tools, can't quite find what I need.

Basically, I often have lists of packages that I don't know about -- such as when you run emerge --depclean -- and I would just like to know what they do. I want it to be fast (i.e. faster than emerge --search, and given full package names I really don't see why it shouldn't be).

I am about to write a stupid little script that fetches it directly from the portage tree (which is probably going to take less time to write than this email), because I am very annoyed with this, but .... it seems to me that is the no.1 thing ahyone would want to do with a package name that is unknown to him, there just MUST already be something that does it, I can't believe it isn't already there; why does it need to be hidden? What is it?

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1313 Location: London

eix ?

blais · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 57

No description from eix:

banane:~/p$ eix x11-apps/ttmkfdir
* x11-apps/ttmkfdir
Available versions: !3.0.9-r2 !3.0.9-r3
Installed: 3.0.9-r3
Homepage: SRC_URI=mirror://gentoo/ttmkfdir-3.0.9.tar.bz2
Description: RDEPEND=sys-libs/zlib >=media-libs/freetype-2.0.8

Verbose will not help much either:

banane:~/p$ eix -v x11-apps/ttmkfdir
* x11-apps/ttmkfdir
Available versions: !3.0.9-r2 !3.0.9-r3
Installed: 3.0.9-r3
Homepage: SRC_URI=mirror://gentoo/ttmkfdir-3.0.9.tar.bz2
Description: RDEPEND=sys-libs/zlib >=media-libs/freetype-2.0.8
Provides: CDEPEND=
License: KEYWORDS=alpha amd64 arm hppa ia64 m68k mips ppc ppc64 s390 sh sparc x86

I see that eix has formatting options that I may tweak to eventually extract the description from it.
Will I remember next time I need to use it? (no)
Will I disable the update-eix cron because when it'll kick in at midnight while I'll be hacking? (yes)

I want something simple. I don't want a cache. I don't want a formatting string. Just the description.

Besides, why isn't eix included with portage?
Isn't this need so basic and used all the time that it should be?
Or why isn't this just a feature of equery?

Don't take me wrong, I love gentoo, deeply, but sometimes I really just don't understand why some of the basic things have to be so convoluted.

(I'll post the script that I wrote between my post and your reply in a minute)

blais · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 57

the script
http://furius.ca/pubcode/pub/conf/common/bin/gentoo-desc

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1313 Location: London

eix -v x11-apps/ttmkfd
* x11-apps/ttmkfdir
Available versions: 3.0.9-r2 3.0.9-r3
Installed: none
Homepage: http://www.joerg-pommnitz.de/TrueType/xfsft.html
Description: A utility to create a fonts.scale file from a set of TrueType fonts
Provides: none
License: as-is

Not sure what you've done differently to me, but IIRC I haven't fiddled with anything so it should be stock...

think4urs11 · Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 7:40 pm Post subject: Re: Nope, eix it is not.

blais · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 57

well, see my output above... I'm not lying.

I've emerged to the latest and haven't fiddled with it either.
Will try removing and re-emerging.

Did that. Reemerging app-portage/eix-0.5.6 seems to have fixed the problem.

proteus:~$ sudo eix x11-apps/ttmkfdir
* x11-apps/ttmkfdir
Available versions: 3.0.9-r2 3.0.9-r3
Installed: 3.0.9-r3
Homepage: http://www.joerg-pommnitz.de/TrueType/xfsft.html
Description: A utility to create a fonts.scale file from a set of TrueType fonts

maraudon · n00b Joined: 19 Mar 2007 Posts: 3

what does eix mean ?

mc_barron · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 2:04 am Post subject:

"eix" is a program:

timeBandit · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 2:47 am Post subject:

blais, you're right, there is already a way. Use the --format option of eix.