Deb version

[simonft]

No description provided.

[majuscule]

Hi Simon!

This is very cool! I've noticed depending on the information returned, some tables are sized too small (for example "debian version apache2-doc").We do have another table style anyway that we'd like to keep cannonical across our zeroclickinfo. I'm not sure if it is live yet though, but I'll get back to you soon with an example.

I was wondering if there was documentation for this API that I can look at? It would be nice if there was some sort of search feature as well as exact matches (for example, apache2-util might still find apache2-utils, and apache2 might show a list of matching packages.

Thank you for submitting this pull request!

[simonft]

I'd love the table style. I was trying to make it decent, failed, then figured if I issued a pull request you'd tell me how you want it styled.

The closest I can find to documentation is here: http://qa.debian.org/madison.php

There is also a soap interface, but it seems that it is still in the alpha phase.
http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/pts/SoapInterface

A list of matching packages might also be an interesting feature for it, I'll look into a way to possibly do that. I may be able to use the debian bug tracker soap interface for it. I was planning on doing a debian bugs plugin too.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebbugsSoapInterface

[yegg]

This is one of the areas where we are hurriedly working to improve the platform. Now that we have some decent looking stuff we want to make it easy to tell us, hey, put it in that state and make it look like that. But it isn't there yet. I'll Dylan follow up with specifics for now.

[majuscule]

Hi again!

I've pushed a debversion branch to our repository with your commits as well as some new that implement our current table style, with a few small adjustments to fit this spice. I also added a large style header with a title that matches our other spice. I still think some results display more tightly than they should (like apache2-doc), but it's acceptable, and I can't think of a way to fix this without undue complication. Do you have any suggestions?

Unfortunately, there is a problem on our end preventing deploy of this plugin on our staging machines. In the mean time, I've put the current changeset up on http://dylan.duckduckgo.com:5000/?q=deb+ver+vim.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

[simonft]

I'm still not sure how to make the searches less tight. I'm looking into an API for the Debian search pages. This may require two calls to outside services though. Is that possible in one plugin?

The table looks great. Much better than what I was heading for.

I'm also thinking of expanding this out to be able to include ubuntu packages, as well as possible other Debian derivatives. This is fairly easy with the search page it is currently using.

[simonft]

I've added a pugin doing the same thing for ubuntu packages. It needed to be a different plugin because I can't figure out a way to pull the distribution to use out of the query in the spice from=> call.

[majuscule]

Awesome! Thanks Simon. Would you mind making the ubuntu package a separate pull request though? We actually do have the ability to make multiple API requests from a single spice, however, I do not think that it is appropriate for this plugin. The primary concern here is long term speed. With different plugins, we can make immediate and coarse decisions about plugin triggering using the trigger words. They can also race asynchronously. This is much preferrable to consecutive HTTP requests, which tend to add up more quickly than you'd guess.

Now about getting this deployed. I'm still getting to the bottom of this encoding issue. Right now I am working on creating a test case distinct from our internal code as we believe that this problem is upstream with nginx - though it may originate in a local configuration error. I will let you know as soon as we have a more concrete determination.

[simonft]

I've added the Ubuntu search as a separate pull request, and removed it from this pull request.

[majuscule]

Hi Simon!

I'm sorry for the delay in responding. We've received another pull request for a fathead (duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead#32) which also triggers on ubuntu/debian package names. Unlike this spice, it returns a brief description for each package, which seems to me to be very helpful. But we don't want to lose the information we have access to here! We've decided to merge your spice plugins into their corresponding fatheads. Of course this means first crawling the endpoint your spice queries for each package listed in the fathead. We've used some internal code to do this asynchronously and add to the existing fathead output.

This is all still very much under design! Please please give us any input you have :-) You are also, of course, welcome to submit patches to the fathead.

We will be attributing both you and @mrshu when the plugin is complete.

Check it out! https://dylan.duckduckgo.com/?q=ubuntu+vim

Thanks again.

[nomeata]

I’m confused. This and the referenced fathead pull requestion talk about Debian package, but on the live site, only ubuntu package search works – why not Debian?

[mrshu]

@nospampleasemam any movement on this front? Should this be closed too?

[jagtalon]

@nospampleasemam ping

[jagtalon]

I talked to @nospampleasemam, and we might still be able to use this code to make a really nice Fathead in the future, so I'm putting this in https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/tree/ideas/deb for now. :)