Better error messages for command not found (was Re: Pull in upstream before 9.1 code freeze?)

[Doug Barton]

On 07/04/2012 17:30, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> On Jul 4, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Jason Hellenthal wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 03:59:29PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>>> On 07/04/2012 15:55, Jason Hellenthal wrote:
>>>> Seeing as sudo plays a big part of this
>>>
>>> No ... not only is sudo not a necessary component, it shouldn't be
>>> involved at all. The feature works on debian/ubuntu for regular
>>> userspace commands.
>>>
>>
>> What are they using to authenticate for the install ? do you know ?
> 
> Huh?  What install?  Who's talking about install?
> 
> The version of this I've seen looks like this:
> 
> $ svn co https://some.url/
> svn: Command not found.
>   To use this command, install one of the following packages:
>       devel/subversion
>       devel/subversion-freebsd
>       devel/subversion16
> 
> That's all it does:  It just prints out a more informative error message.
> It does not install anything, it requires no special permissions,
> and does not (as far as I can see) introduce any security or
> performance problems.
> 
> The implementation is pretty simple:
>  * A tool for building a database that maps command names
>    to package names.  (This would run against a ports tree or
>    package repository.  Conceptually, it's pretty similar to
>    how port/package indexes get built today.)
>  * Some way to distribute that database (Probably as part of ISO
>    releases, maybe extend 'portsnap' or 'pkg_add' to update it?)
>  * A program to look up command names in that database
>    and print out the results.
>  * A shell hook to run said program whenever a "command not found"
>    error occurs.
> 
> As a first prototype, the database could just be a text file
> and the look up program could be a shell script that uses
> grep and sed.

Right-O. The db should almost certainly be updated and distributed as
part of the (already automated) INDEX generation and distribution process.

Doug

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