Matching package names across distributions

[James Antill]

On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 13:48 +0000, Enrico Zini wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> now that I'm back from vacations and we are all in this list, it's time
> to announce that we have an initial prototype for a distribution
> matching tool: http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/
> 
> You can follow that link for technical details, git URLs and examples.
> Please feel free to quote bits here if you'd like to discuss them.
> 
> It's hard to measure the quality of the result because we don't have an
> optimal match to benchmark against. My idea for "evaluating" it is to
> just start using it for something, notice if there are gaps and see how
> to fill them.

 I tried it, but it didn't go as well as I'd hoped (some of the
"failures" below could just be weird UI from the distromatch command):

% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora xapian-bindings-python     
fedora:xapian-bindings-python debian:
fedora:xapian-bindings-python mandriva:xapian-bindings-python
fedora:xapian-bindings-python suse:
% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora glibc
fedora:glibc debian:
fedora:glibc mandriva:glibc
fedora:glibc suse:glibc
% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora zsh-html
fedora:zsh-html debian:
fedora:zsh-html mandriva:
fedora:zsh-html suse:
% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora openoffice.org-calc
fedora:openoffice.org-calc debian:app-install-data,broffice.org,libreoffice-calc,openoffice.org-calc
fedora:openoffice.org-calc mandriva:openoffice.org-calc
fedora:openoffice.org-calc suse:
% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora xpaint
fedora:xpaint debian:app-install-data,kappfinder,xpaint
fedora:xpaint mandriva:kappfinder,libxaw3dxft6,xpaint
fedora:xpaint suse:
% ./distromatch/distromatch fedora openssl
fedora:openssl debian:openssl
fedora:openssl mandriva:libopenssl0.9.8,libopenssl1.0.0,openssl
fedora:openssl suse:compat-openssl097g,libopenssl0_9_8,openssl

...it also doesn't seem to understand multilib. so you can find out that
blah.x86_64 on Fedora is libblah62.x86_64 on SuSE, but you can't find
out that blah.i686 is libblah62-32bit.x86_64.