Whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search

I made this in under 100 lines bash and it supports Arch, RHEL-based, Debian-based, Alpine and OpenSuse. But the problem is that some distros just have rubbish native search of package files.

And of course my tool searches their native package manager, not their online services, API, package repos. That's a completely different approach.

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.

Who has?

Nixpkgs has. :)

Nowadays the only search like this I need to run is

  nix-locate -r 'bin/foo$'

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.

Shame Homebrew for Linux is getting no love from any of the tools / lists mentioned here.

Since switching to that and flatpak my distro choice is "what sticks closest to the upstream of [my preferred DE]"

There is also https://pkgs.org ..

I've been working on a GUI task manager for Linux and I've been wanting to put a "Funding" or ownership meta data next to the process or process group in the view so people can know where the upstream code lives, how to support the project, and what organizational unit "owns" that process.

So I actually vibe coded a script that does this against a sqlite db I've been considering to bundle with my task manager so it can know this stuff on the fly.

But yea this is a key missing component in Linux user space. Windows let's you encode organizational stuff into an exe but on Linux binaries don't really have that.

This would pair nicely with distrobox or Bedrock Linux:)

Oh nice, I just implemented something like this for installing from any package manager uv-style https://abxpkg.archivebox.io/, but I haven't added a "search" command yet, I should add that!

Related:

List of linux package search databases:

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

"Just gimme thething, I don't care where from" is a great way to get supply chain vulns

This is exactly the kind of boring CLI tool that earns its keep. Package names and availability differ just enough across distros to waste time in tiny annoying increments.

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.