{"id":179,"date":"2012-11-25T22:46:15","date_gmt":"2012-11-25T21:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjiweber.co.uk\/blog\/?p=179"},"modified":"2012-12-03T22:23:30","modified_gmt":"2012-12-03T21:23:30","slug":"webpinstant-software-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjiweber.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/11\/25\/webpinstant-software-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Webpinstant &#8211; Software Search"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"lead\">A few years ago I wrote a tool called webpin that allowed people to search for openSUSE packages across all openSUSE repositories, both by package names and their contents.<\/p>\n<p>This was useful for finding where a package for a particular file was located. openSUSE had an awful lot of separate package repositories (There are now over 3,000 for 12.2).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/webpinstant.com\/\">It&#8217;s now back, and better, at http:\/\/webpinstant.com\/<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<img src=\"http:\/\/files.benjiweber.co.uk\/webpinstant1.png\" alt=\"Webpinstant\" \/>\n<p>I have now re-written this tool. It&#8217;s now much faster at both searching and indexing, meaning it can index a lot more and hopefully provide better results.<\/p>\n<p>Sample Searches:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/webpinstant.com\/search\/kde%20irc%20client\">kde irc client<\/a><\/p>\n<p>(Brings back konversation and quassel).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/webpinstant.com\/search\/bzcat\">bzcat<\/a><\/p>\n<p>(brings back bzip2 on debian)<\/p>\n<h3>Multiple Distributions<\/h3>\n<p>I have also added support for other distributions including Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. In fact any distribution that uses <a href=\"http:\/\/linux.die.net\/man\/8\/createrepo\">repo-md<\/a> or debian style repositories can be easily added to the index.<\/p>\n<img src=\"http:\/\/files.benjiweber.co.uk\/webpinstant2.png\" alt=\"Select Distribution\" \/>\n<p>So far it has an index of repositories for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>openSUSE 12.1<\/li>\n<li>openSUSE 12.2<\/li>\n<li>Fedora 17<\/li>\n<li>Ubuntu Quantal<\/li>\n<li>Debian Squeeze<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let me know suggestions of more distributions you&#8217;d like to see indexed. RHEL, CENTOS, and SLES seem like obvious candidates.<\/p>\n<h3>Ubuntu Limitations<\/h3>\n<p>openSUSE build service repositories are detected automatically. I&#8217;d like to do the same for Ubuntu PPAs but haven&#8217;t yet worked out how to obtain a list of PPAs programmatically. If you have a suggestion please let me know. In the meantime please do suggest any important PPAs that it would be useful to index.<\/p>\n<p>I also can&#8217;t find the Contents.gz files in Ubuntu PPAs that are available in other Debian repositories. These provide a lot more metadata for searching. Am I just failing to look well enough or are they missing from PPAs?<\/p>\n<h3>Search\/Ranking<\/h3>\n<p>Some of the things indexed include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Package Names<\/li>\n<li>Summaries<\/li>\n<li>Descriptions<\/li>\n<li>RPM provides<\/li>\n<li>Files within packages<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Basically anything found in Primary.xml\/FileLists.xml in repo-md repositories and anything found in the Packages and Contents lists in Debian repositories.<\/p>\n<p>I have also put a lot of work into improving the search ranking based on cases that the original webpin performed poorly on. I suspect there will still be lots of things that are not found or not ranked highly. If you can&#8217;t find what you&#8217;re looking for with webpin then please let me know what your search terms were and if possible what you expected to appear as a result.<\/p>\n<h3>API and Command line app<\/h3>\n<p>I have added support for the old API that the command line webpin app by <a href=\"http:\/\/dev-loki.blogspot.co.uk\/\">Pascal Bleser<\/a> wrote.<\/p>\n<p>You can try it out if you like. To update the tool to use the new webpin on openSUSE 12.2 you need to edit a couple of files. First add the following to distVersionMap in \/usr\/lib\/python2.7\/site-packages\/webpin\/const.py<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"python\">'12.2': 'openSUSE_122',<\/pre>\n<p>Then change the server line in the same file as follows<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"python\">server = 'webpinstant.com'<\/pre>\n<h3>Future Features<\/h3>\n<p>Things I&#8217;d like to add other than more distros \/ repositories include:<\/p>\n<p>* <a href=\"http:\/\/en.opensuse.org\/openSUSE:One_Click_Install\">One Click Install<\/a> support. Adding install links to the search results. This is something that the old webpin had.<br \/>\n* A better API desktop\/command line clients<\/p>\n<h3>Feedback<\/h3>\n<p>Please do let me know bug reports \/ feature requests. In particular I&#8217;m interested in<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What distributions should I index<\/li>\n<li>What repositories should I index?<\/li>\n<li>What searches result in badly ranked results<\/li>\n<li>What future features should I prioritise?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Please let me know using email <a href=\"mailto:webpin at benjiweber.co.uk\">webpin at benjiweber.co.uk<\/a> or <a href=\"irc:\/\/irc.freenode.net\/benjiman\">find me on freenode (benjiman).<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/benjiweber\">@benjiweber<\/a> on twitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago I wrote a tool called webpin that allowed people to search for openSUSE packages across all openSUSE repositories, both by package names and their contents. This was useful for finding where a package for a particular file was located. openSUSE had an awful lot of separate package repositories (There are now&#8230;  <a href=\"https:\/\/benjiweber.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/11\/25\/webpinstant-software-search\/\" class=\"more-link\" title=\"Read Webpinstant &#8211; Software Search\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v14.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/benjiweber.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/11\/25\/webpinstant-software-search\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Webpinstant - Software Search - Benji&#039;s Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A few years ago I wrote a tool called webpin that allowed people to search for openSUSE packages across all openSUSE repositories, both by package names and their contents. This was useful for finding where a package for a particular file was located. openSUSE had an awful lot of separate package repositories (There are now... 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