How to find a package that provides X

Sstteeffaan

Hello, I am trying to figure out how to find a package that provides a particular file or feature.
Say, I wanted to use a utility where the name of the package is not obvious, let's say the pdfnup tool, that in Debian is packaged in texlive-extra-utils,

How would I find that? In other words: How do I search the package database for a particular file?
I tried eopkg info with the -f option, but to no avail.

Thanks.

DataDrake

Sstteeffaan pdfnup is directly in the base texlive package. We split texlive a lot differently than most distros. In most cases, texlive and texlive-fonts-extra will have what you need.

In general though, eopkg can only search for a file in currently installed packages. It doesn't support searching all of the repo for a file. If I can come up with a compact (storage size) way of doing that for sol I may implement it.

synth-ruiner

eopkg search blah will return any packages with "blah" in the name or summary, if that helps. I don't know enough about pdfnup to help with that specifically though.

dbarron

Since you're going to be using sql, you could make that a remote sql call to a server? (probably not..but an idea)

DataDrake

dbarron I might be using sqlite3 for a database file to cache a few things, not an actual sql server.

dbarron

Yeah kinda figured 🙂 Oh well, that would make it so much faster for less powerful hardware to search out.

DataDrake

Sstteeffaan
dbarron

The issue isn't what's easier, faster, or simpler. The issue is that we would then have to deal with hosting a web-service that is expected to handle every search from every user. That sounds good on paper, but can get expensive and time-consuming quickly. I'd much rather have an optional database which you can download to do the search locally. I just haven't had time to think about storing that efficiently.

Sstteeffaan

Searching in not-installed packages would be a neat feature to have; not necessarily locally. A website would suffice.
Thanks for the answers anyway.