whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search
47 points by peter_d_sherman 3 hours ago | 10 comments

dilawar 33 seconds ago
There is also https://pkgs.org ..
reply
chb 2 hours ago
First I saw that it's written in Perl. Then I realized that the last release was 11 years ago and that the repository domains are hardcoded in the one-file script.
reply
Intralexical 43 minutes ago
Does it still work, though?

Where else would you put the repository domains?

reply
bblb 36 minutes ago
This kind of busy work should suit an AI agent:

Go and find me all the repolists and package/software metadata for any distro and OS ever released. Write the results to a local SQLite. Incrementally update, but don't hammer the sources to death. Provide a web UI and CLI.

reply
embedding-shape 5 minutes ago
Or you know, you could do that with a ~100 long script. You don't have to use LLMs for everything, especially when you're not dealing with freeform text at all, use data types and data structures, we've created the concepts for a reason.
reply
Fnoord 2 hours ago
Latest release: May 19, 2015

Abandoned, but forkable (since FOSS), and a decent idea.

Probably nowadays this gets done in Node, parsing the package search websites. Preferably, this would be done via an API though.

reply
RunningDroid 50 minutes ago
> Probably nowadays this gets done in Node, parsing the package search websites. Preferably, this would be done via an API though.

Repology provides an API but it's unstable: https://repology.org/api/v1

reply
lschueller 2 hours ago
Yes, agree. The idea and concept is cool! Imo worth it to keep an eye on it and play with it.

First thought, which came to my mind, was a security use case to get it to a point for sbom handling and tracking. In particular, respective to all the recent package vulnerabilities.

reply
yjftsjthsd-h 43 minutes ago
This would pair nicely with distrobox or Bedrock Linux:)
reply
peter_d_sherman 3 hours ago
Related:

List of linux package search databases:

https://github.com/sxiii/awesome-package-search

reply