[packagekit] search-file pattern search

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Mounir
Lamouri<mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, according to yum backend and specifications, key represents the
> entire path. So, if I want to search which package own myfile.foo i
> will have to enter /bar/myfile.foo. A bit hard as I only want to
> search for a file, not a path. We have room to put a lot of results so
> even if the file is present in various packages, it will not be so
> hard to see which one was the good candidate.

Hmm. I originally specified the original path for speed -- most of the
consumers of this api just want to know "what package owns this file"
rather than "find the package that contains this filename".

> So, I would like to use the key in the search-file for portage backend
> as the entire file name without the path and I would like to know if
> this way of doing can be generalized or, at least, officialy accepted.
> I don't want portage backend to be the only one using search-file like
> this but I really think it's much more user-friendly. Maybe we could
> even accept the two ways of doing to be retro-compatible.

Yes, the API would have to be backwards compatible, but this is pretty
easy to accomplish:

SearchFile("/path/to/file.conf") = absolute path
SearchFile("file.conf") = ignore path

If you want to support the latter in your backend, then I urge you to
also support the absolute path variant (starting with slash), else
some of the GUI tools are going to get very confused. If we add this
as a spec extension, it's important to add this to the spec xml
documentation so other backends can all do the same thing.

Otherwise, keep up the good work.

Richard.