whohas 0.11
Description
whohas is a command line tool that allows querying several package lists at once - currently supported are Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Source Mage, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. whohas is written in Perl and was designed to help package maintainers find ebuilds, pkgbuilds and similar package definitions from other distributions to learn from. However, it can also be used by normal users who want to know:
- Which distribution provides packages on which the user depends.
- What version of a given package is in use in each distribution, or in each release of a distribution (implemented only for Debian).
Tutorial
You can use grep to improve your search results. Depending on whether you want only packages whose names begin with your search term, end with your search term, or exactly match, you would use a space before, after or on both sides of your search term, respectively:
whohas gimp | grep " gimp"
whohas vim | grep "vim "
whohas gimp | grep " gimp "
The spaces will ensure that only results for the package gimp are displayed, not for gimp-print etc.
If you want results for a particular distribution only, do
whohas arch | grep "^Arch"
Output looks like this. The first column is the name of the distribution, the second the name of the package, the third the version number, then the date, repository name and a url linking to more information about the package. Future versions will have package size information, too. Column lengths are fixed, so you can use cut:
whohas vim | grep " vim " | cut -b 36-45
The first bytes of the data fields at the time of writing are 11, 37, 48, 53, 64 and 76.
Here is an example of whohas in a terminal session, showing how it works with grep and cut.
Features and limitations
Debian refers to the binary distribution. Slackware queries Current only. All details (including availability, version numbers and binary sizes) are for the x86 architecture, although this cannot be assured for either Debian or Gentoo in the current version of whohas. I recommend you consult the URLs provided in the output, which give detailed and accurate information about each package. You may want to use a terminal that recognises hyperlinks and allows easy access through the browser, such as gnome-terminal.
Appeal
I would like to encourage distributors at this time to provide web query interfaces to package lists, and specifically provide the following information: package name, version, date, size and a url to further information (maintainer, build information etc.)
Why "whohas"?
whohas started life as whichdistro.pl, but its author preferred the shorter, hopefully more memorable name which is more conducive to word play.
Dependencies
- date utility
- Perl
- LWP::UserAgent (usually packaged as perl-libwww or libwww-perl)
Download
Bug reports
updated 23 July 2005