Ubuntu has a cool feature called command-not-found where they publish an index of all the binaries on the system, and the package that each one belongs to. When you combine this with the bash command-not-found hook, you get a default environment that responds to a missing command by telling you what package to download. (Sorry, too lazy for screenshots…)
Anyway, this feature would be a good use for the new pkg command. You could write a script that creates an index of all binaries, and then store that index in the user’s home directory. Another script could react to the command-not-found hook in bash and tell the user something useful.
In fact, you could almost do this interactively by querying the pkg database, except that when I query ‘dbx’ (for example), I get 37 hits. Most are for the different versions of the right package, and a few are for a package-alias of some kind. A script that got that answer would need to apply some clever heuristics to do the right thing.
It seems like a good afternoon project, but I haven’t had a spare afternoon in quite a while. The pkg-discuss@opensolaris.org alias can offer help with pkg issues.
Any takers?
