Dimi Paun wrote: [...]
However the RedHat / Fedora Core package manager was awfully inadequate, offering no search functionality at all (<flame>they probably think the dumbed-down categories remove the need for it</flame>).
The package manager does not do that. Did you try http://rpmfind.net? Also, the packages should be available via yum (most likely at DAG http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/rpmforge.php)
As far as I could see neither will let me search for a package based on the name of a file it contains. For instance in both cases a search on 'gettext.pm' returns no result though both know about perl-Locale-gettext.
But I found http://rpm.pbone.net/ which seems to be giving good results. However it often gives more than one result for a given distribution and it's not always clear which packages are official and which are not. For instance nsgmls seems to be provided by opensp and openjade on Fedora. I think openjade is the official package...
In fact I did not find *any* perl package listed in RedHat's package manager!
And herein lies the problem: hate it or love it, it's the most used distribution, and it should work on it first and foremost.
Hehe, maybe.. maybe not. According to DesktopLinux RedHat (including Fedora Core) was third behind Mandrake and SUSE. http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2127420238.html Not that their 'survey' is very reliable or that this is very important, Fedora is one of the main Linux distributions anyway.
On a slightly different note, I think you are comparing apples to oranges: you want rpm to provide search equivalent to what an indexing site does for Debian. It shouldn't and there are such sites out there.
True but I also mentioned that SUSE's Yast2 let me search for the package providing a given file even if that package was not installed. This is exactly the functionality that is missing from RedHat's package manager (and from Debian's). I also mentioned that the problem I encountered was probably at least partly related to my inexperience with RPM.