A Program to view (long)descriptions of packages.

[tommyjs]

I've made a script to show descriptions of packages in a given portage category(-ies). It may optionally use <longdescription> from metadata.xml files. The output can be coloured text or html with package names linked towards pakage homepages.

The program can also be used as a filter. In this case it's behaviour differs. It tries to retrieve a list of items like category/package and shows information only about these packages.

[tommyjs]

I've made many changes to the program.

Features:

* Shows descriptions and optionally long descriptions of packages in a portage category, from the output of a command,...
* Nice html and text output
* html output - package names linked against homepages of packages or embed homepages in the generated page
* Distinguishes between installed and not installed packages
* Can use <longdescription> from metadata.xml files
* Can be used to display descriptions of packages from the output of other commands like emerge -p, esearch -ncS
* zsh and bash completion
* there is an ebuild right now
* automatically displays html output in a www browser and text output in a pager.
* html output uses css stylesheet.

Samples and screenshots:

Html output
tsportageview -d -H x11-wm
tsportageview -d -H 'gnustep-*'
esearch -ncS math | tsportageview -d -H -e

Text output
output of
tsportageview -d <<EOF
hmm, we can use sci-mathematics/Macaulay2
with app-misc/ledit or app-misc/rlwrap-0.21
EOF

tsportageview -O app-portage


Home page Man page Ebuild

[tommyjs]

There is a new version 0.7

It has much faster longdescription; it uses xml from app-text/xmlstarlet now.

Also generated html is now logically divided.

The text output is better as well.


BTW.

Is anyone using it, any comments, suggestions?

[IWBCMAN]

first off I am really impress with your little program here-it is trully amazing....

I would like to point out some difficulties I had installing it....

1) your ebuild does not correctly deal with zsh/zsh-completion....I did not have the USE flage for zsh-completion enabled and it still failed due to an error with zsh-completion....I commented out the lines in postinst that deal with zsh and the ebuild installed ok...(I don't have or use zsh...)

2) xmlstarlet has not been updated in ages (march 2005) which means it no longer works with new versions of libxml2 or libxslt - in order to install your program I had to copy /usr/portage/dev-libs/libxslt and /usr/portage/dev-libs/libxml2 to my overlay directory and modify the older versions of the ebuild to use SLOT="1" and then installed those versions so that xmlstarter would compile.

specifically
libxml2: 2.6.19
and
libxslt: 1.1.13-r1

the problem is that new versions of libxslt and libxml are simply incompatible with xmlstarlet yet required by things like GNOME-2.12 -I changed the SLOT values in the ebuild so that there would(hopefully) be no conflict with apps which require the new version.....

3) firefox-1.5beta does not work with your program when selected in the configuration file- I assume changes to firefox deerpark are responsible for this. However Seamonkey-1.0a does work- and works wonderfully !

aside from these issues (and 3 isn't really important) your program is absolutely amazing and something I am already recommending to others.....please don't be to discouraged by the lack of response here- it is really great!

and by the way it works wonderfully with eix.....perhaps if the libxml2/libxslt problem can be solved this could be integrated into eix proper..

I tried to download xmlstarlet from cvs and see if it would compile with the current versions of libxml2 and libxslt but the cvs server just hung.....if it does work with current versions you might want to revision bump the xmlstarlet ebuild and provide a tarball of the newer cvs version of xmlstarlet.....