Nice idea. It would be really great if we had a central website where to put packaged library, so we could query that. I'll try to develop an Anarki-local version.
I've put something on Anarki. You can query installed packages (i.e. packages in the search path) using regular expressions:
> (pack-query "a regular expression")
The query looks in the packages' name and description. The first time it also builds a cache of installed packages name/description in ~/.arc/cache . After installing new packages, use
> (pack-build-cache)
to update the cache. If you try it now on Anarki you'll get no result because there are no packages on Anarki.
How long would 'pack-build-cache have to run? Is it possible for it to just check for newer packages? Because if it's not too long, it might be useful to have it start automatically, or even as a:
(thread
(while t
(pack-build-cache)
(sleep 1000)))
It just dumps the title and the description to a text file and there is no way to check only for newer packages. Maybe it would be possible with a real implementation, this is just a prototype. Making it run continously in the background is thus unacceptable. I don't think it's a problem for the user to type (pack-build-cache) after installing new libraries.
A possible implementation: use the Anarki repository as the website and build the package manager on top of git. I don't know much about gems so I don't know if this would work, but it would save a lot of reinventing the wheel.
To knock down my own suggestion: git isn't suitable for this because it doesn't have any way of partially downloading a repository. At least, none that I can find.
