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rated 0 times [  2] [ 0]  / answers: 1 / hits: 387  / 3 Years ago, fri, june 25, 2021, 3:08:27

I'm working on a successor of auto-apt which indexes package information used by apt and traces I/O requests of files contained in those packages as a program wrapper and installes them automatically.



Therefore I'd like to know how many packages there're roughly in Ubuntu (the potency of 10 is sufficient), so that I can conduct some estimates on algorithmic complexity.



The original code seems unmaintained for decades and the author isn't reachable under the last know address (I wrote him ~ a year ago, but he didn't reply). The program seems to have been kicked out of Ubuntu in 17.10. Furthermore the code is complete comment- and test-free (don't ever do that, please!) and I need to guess what the purpose of a tree-like data structure was (could have been a programming challenge) and whether I can just replace it with a fast third-party key-value implementation.


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The apt-file command can be used to look up which package provides a given file. You need to run apt-file update so that it can download the file listing, and:



$ apt-file update

apt-file is now using the user's cache directory.

If you want to switch back to the system-wide cache directory,

 run 'apt-file purge'

Downloading complete file http://jp.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial/Contents-amd64.gz

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current

                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed

  9 31.7M    9 2927k    0     0   282k      0  0:01:54  0:00:10  0:01:44  481k


So Contents-amd64.gz is a 31 MB file after compression. Opening it in Vim, I see it has 5400831 lines, with about 30 lines in this header:



This file maps each file available in the Ubuntu

system to the package from which it originates.  It includes packages

from the DIST distribution for the ARCH architecture.



You can use this list to determine which package contains a specific

file, or whether or not a specific file is available.  The list is

updated weekly, each architecture on a different day.



When a file is contained in more than one package, all packages are

listed.  When a directory is contained in more than one package, only

the first is listed.



The best way to search quickly for a file is with the Unix `grep'

utility, as in `grep <regular expression> CONTENTS':



 $ grep nose Contents

 etc/nosendfile                                          net/sendfile

 usr/X11R6/bin/noseguy                                   x11/xscreensaver

 usr/X11R6/man/man1/noseguy.1x.gz                        x11/xscreensaver

 usr/doc/examples/ucbmpeg/mpeg_encode/nosearch.param     graphics/ucbmpeg

 usr/lib/cfengine/bin/noseyparker                        admin/cfengine



This list contains files in all packages, even though not all of the

packages are installed on an actual system at once.  If you want to

find out which packages on an installed Debian system provide a

particular file, you can use `dpkg --search <filename>':



 $ dpkg --search /usr/bin/dselect

 dpkg: /usr/bin/dselect





FILE                                                    LOCATION


So, we have:



5.4 million files, give or take a few.


[#9325] Friday, June 25, 2021, 3 Years  [reply] [flag answer]
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