Feature request: information about package

[fourier]

Where is no (?) way to get the information about particular package.
When searching for some packages using ql:system-apropos the packages found are displayed, but there is no way to get more information about particular package: i.e. metadata, url, etc.
In unix package managers there is always a command like "apt-cache show" or "port info" which provides an information about particular package.

[fourier]

Up this issue. Studying contents of the output of ql-dist:system-apropos-list, could not find any references to original packages or its source.
Quickdocs project apparently doesn't accept any contributions nor provides test environment to develop on base of it.
Therefore some trivial information/api on details of different packages is needed since it will enable projects similar to quickdocs without that much efforts.

[foretspaisibles]

An example from the OCaml ecosystem is the opam info command. Here is an example output of the command, requiring details about the rashell package:

% opam info rashell
             package: rashell
             version: 0.3.0
              pinned: path
        upstream-url: /Users/michael/Workshop/rashell
       upstream-kind: local
            homepage: https://github.com/michipili/rashell
         bug-reports: https://github.com/michipili/rashell/issues
            dev-repo: https://github.com/michipili/rashell.git
              author: Michael Grünewald
             license: MIT
                tags: shell
             depends: ocamlfind & atdgen >= 1.7.1 & broken >= 0.4.2 & bsdowl >= 3.0.0 & lwt >= 2.5.0 & mixture >= 0.2.0
  installed-versions: 0.2.0-current [4.02.3], 0.3.0 [4.04.0]
  available-versions: 0.1.0, 0.2.0, 0.2.1, 0.3.0
         description: A resilient and replicant shell programming library

As discussed by Lowell Jay Arthur in “Unix shell programming”
(2nd ed.), the Unix shell is a brillant tool for quickly
designing prototypes.  Unluckily, error management is very
difficult in the shell.  Most interfaces to the Unix shell found in
programming languages share this fragile optimism, which makes
impossible to write maintainable and resilient programs.

Rashell defines primitives which combine ease of use with the ability
to write maintainable and resilient programs leveraging the full power
of Unix.  These primitives implements common patterns to interact with
Unix utilities as subprocesses. These patterns either yield a string
or a stream of lines, which will also adequately report error
conditions on subprocesses.

Rashell is based on the excellent Lwt library and its Lwt_process
module.

WWW: https://github.com/michipili/rashell

(The pinned-path is an internal detail and the rest is more or less self-explanatory.) It would indeed be great to access or use use in searches the available metadata.

[quicklisp]

Thanks for the example. I very much want to make it easy to access that kind of provenance info in Quicklisp with a single command. It is a work in progress.