Please add pseudo-portnames for some common programs

[noloader (Jeffrey Walton)]

According to port help:

$ port help
port ...

Pseudo-portnames
----------------
Pseudo-portnames are words that may be used in place of a portname, and
which expand to some set of ports. The common pseudo-portnames are:
all, current, active, inactive, actinact, installed, uninstalled, outdated,
obsolete, requested, unrequested and leaves.
These pseudo-portnames expand to the set of ports named.
...

I'm not sure what the list should be, but I'm fairly certain it should include compilers:

$ port search g++
No match for g++ found
$ port search 'g++'
No match for g++ found
$ port search 'g\+\+'
No match for g\+\+ found
$ port search '*g++*'
No match for *g++* found
$ port search 'clang++'
No match for clang++ found
$ port search 'clang\+\+'
No match for clang\+\+ found
$ port search '*clang++*'
No match for *clang++* found

And from ​What is the name of the Bouncy Castle Port:

$ port search BouncyCastle
No match for BouncyCastle found
$ port search Bouncy-Castle
No match for Bouncy-Castle found
$ port search '*BouncyCastle*'
No match for *BouncyCastle* found
$ port search '*Bouncy-Castle*'
No match for *Bouncy-Castle* found

According to the answer, the package name is lcrypto. As a naive user, I would expect that name to be closer to OpenSSL because on uses -lcrypto to include it.

---

$ port version
Version: 2.3.4

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

This has nothing to do with pseudo-portnames and everything to do with individual ports needing to have more descriptive descriptions. Please file tickets against the individual ports that need fixes.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

In the case of lcrypto, it does include the words "Bouncy Castle" in the long description, but not in the short description, and port search by default only searches the short description. You can get it to search the long description by passing a flag:

$ port search --long_description bouncy
lcrypto @1.28 (java, crypto)
    Java cryptographic library

but I admit this is not ideal. Maybe we should consider making port search also search the long description by default.

I hope eventually to have a redesigned MacPorts web site which will provide more information about each port and be more easily searchable.

[noloader (Jeffrey Walton)]

Replying to ryandesign@…:

This has nothing to do with pseudo-portnames and everything to do with individual ports needing to have more descriptive descriptions. Please file tickets against the individual ports that need fixes.

Well, you have your first list here.

Why not just fix it since you have a report in hand?

[noloader (Jeffrey Walton)]

Replying to ryandesign@…:

In the case of lcrypto, it does include the words "Bouncy Castle" in the long description, but not in the short description, and port search by default only searches the short description. You can get it to search the long description by passing a flag:

$ port search --long_description bouncy
lcrypto @1.28 (java, crypto)
    Java cryptographic library

but I admit this is not ideal. Maybe we should consider making port search also search the long description by default.

Yes, agreed. It would probably be better if things "just worked" out of the box without requiring the user to do extra things.

[noloader (Jeffrey Walton)]

Replying to noloader@…:

Replying to ryandesign@…:

In the case of lcrypto, it does include the words "Bouncy Castle" in the long description, but not in the short description, and port search by default only searches the short description. You can get it to search the long description by passing a flag:

$ port search --long_description bouncy
lcrypto @1.28 (java, crypto)
    Java cryptographic library

but I admit this is not ideal. Maybe we should consider making port search also search the long description by default.

Yes, agreed. It would probably be better if things "just worked" out of the box without requiring the user to do extra things.

I was thinking about this earlier this evening. When I want to install a missing program, I usually type {port|apt|yum|...} <program name>. For example, curl, wget, make, gmake, gcc, g++, clang, clang++, gdb, lldb, etc.

Perhaps the first step should be to add the common binary name rather than the long description?

I think its important to keep extraneous noise to a minimum. Generally speaking, I *don't* want "depends" and "reverse depends" information showing up in my search results because it pollutes the results to the points they are nearly unusable for some packages. I fear a long description will do that sort of thing (my apologies if I am wrong). If I want dependencies or reverse dependencies, then I'll perform the package query with the appropriate switch.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

The --long_description modifier is just the field as written in the Portfile.

Regarding searching for binaries in ports, this is a completely different problem that would be addressed by having an offline index of port contents for uninstalled ports.

As this ticket does not propose any solution, I am closing this. Please start discussion on the macports-dev mailing list. Only after having a plan, a ticket should be created with the outcome of the discussion to track the progress of the implementation.

[dardo82 (Michele Venturi)]

This is why I haven't made a ticket about searching binaries in the port index but I've asked on IRC and by email instead.