Distribution package names

[pwaring]

This is a feature request rather than a bug. It would be incredibly useful if the API had a way of returning the relevant package(s) for Linux distributions for those of us who prefer to use the packaged version instead of installing from CPAN. For example, Archive::Zip the Debian package is libarchive-zip-perl (and it might be possible to extract this programmatically from Debian's package database, since Perl modules have a consistent file name convention).

[monken]

Do you know of any directory that provides the mapping from perl distribution to debian package names?

[pwaring]

The Debian package directory has a list of all files for each package, which can be searched:

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Since the modules are extracted using a consistent file path convention, you could find Archive::Zip by searching for paths ending in 'Archive/Zip.pm'. I'm not sure if there's a link to download the whole database anywhere, but if that could be obtained it would save having to query debian.org each time.

Some work has already been done on finding packages from other distros given a Debian package name, so if the Debian packaging part was cracked that could potentially be used to find the Fedora packages :

http://enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/
http://enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch-deploy/

[ranguard]

No one stepped forward to do this - Closing as part of Nov 2014 cleanup