First I saw that it's written in Perl. Then I realized that the last release was 11 years ago and that the repository domains are hardcoded in the one-file script.
The URL to search for packages in Ubuntu for example hasn't changed to my knowledge. Are you assuming it's only looking for packages in releases that were current at the time?
Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:
foo
And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:
, foo
And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.
Yes, agree. The idea and concept is cool! Imo worth it to keep an eye on it and play with it.
First thought, which came to my mind, was a security use case to get it to a point for sbom handling and tracking. In particular, respective to all the recent package vulnerabilities.
I've been working on a GUI task manager for Linux and I've been wanting to put a "Funding" or ownership meta data next to the process or process group in the view so people can know where the upstream code lives, how to support the project, and what organizational unit "owns" that process.
So I actually vibe coded a script that does this against a sqlite db I've been considering to bundle with my task manager so it can know this stuff on the fly.
But yea this is a key missing component in Linux user space. Windows let's you encode organizational stuff into an exe but on Linux binaries don't really have that.
Do Linux users actually use Homebrew day to day? My impression of it was that it's mostly for MacOS users that want to keep doing things the same way instead of learning the Linux way (using the OS package manager).
I have for a while yeah. As mentioned it means the distro packages don't matter for a lot of developer tools / CLIs. Wanna use a stable Debian / Ubuntu LTS for years? Want to use rolling releases so your desktop is up to date? Homebrew's got you covered.
In bazzite/Fedora Silverblue, it's the expected way non-GUI packages are installed to the host system. The other way is toolbox/distrobox (rootless containers tightly integrated with the host).
Oh nice, I just implemented something like this for installing from any package manager uv-style https://abxpkg.archivebox.io/, but I haven't added a "search" command yet, I should add that!
This is exactly the kind of boring CLI tool that earns its keep. Package names and availability differ just enough across distros to waste time in tiny annoying increments.
Go and find me all the repolists and package/software metadata for any distro and OS ever released. Write the results to a local SQLite. Incrementally update, but don't hammer the sources to death. Provide a web UI and CLI.
Or you know, you could do that with a ~100 long script. You don't have to use LLMs for everything, especially when you're not dealing with freeform text at all, use data types and data structures, we've created the concepts for a reason.
Sure. But then I would have to use my brain to actually write code. I thought we were past that already. Also, if it's an agent that keeps scouring the net autonomously for more distros, then I wouldn't have to update the sources manually on my 100 line script.
Where else would you put the repository domains?
Nixpkgs has. :)
Nowadays the only search like this I need to run is
It would be nice to have a CLI alternative to Repology, though.Abandoned, but forkable (since FOSS), and a decent idea.
Probably nowadays this gets done in Node, parsing the package search websites. Preferably, this would be done via an API though.
Repology provides an API but it's unstable: https://repology.org/api/v1
First thought, which came to my mind, was a security use case to get it to a point for sbom handling and tracking. In particular, respective to all the recent package vulnerabilities.
So I actually vibe coded a script that does this against a sqlite db I've been considering to bundle with my task manager so it can know this stuff on the fly.
But yea this is a key missing component in Linux user space. Windows let's you encode organizational stuff into an exe but on Linux binaries don't really have that.
Since switching to that and flatpak my distro choice is "what sticks closest to the upstream of [my preferred DE]"
List of linux package search databases:
https://github.com/sxiii/awesome-package-search
Go and find me all the repolists and package/software metadata for any distro and OS ever released. Write the results to a local SQLite. Incrementally update, but don't hammer the sources to death. Provide a web UI and CLI.