
manifest-search REGEXP...

This operation expects a list of Python regular expressions, and will search
for them inside the "manifest contents". It should be used in combination with
"update-manifest" to answer the question "which package provides this file?".
Note that the "local-search" operation will probably be faster if you already
have the file.

Deeper explanation follows:

Inside every Slackware mirror, you will notice there are some files called
MANIFEST.bz2, which are files that list package contents in a way similar to
the local package files you can find in /var/log/packages. There is not a
single MANIFEST.bz2 file per Slackware version. Instead, there is a
MANIFEST.bz2 file for /slackware, another one for /extra, etc.

If you want to know which package provides a given file, and you have the file,
the local-search operation will search for files using /var/log/packages and is
generally faster. However, you sometimes may be missing a file, like a library,
and apparently the file is nowhere to be found in your system, signaling that
you are missing a package. You want to know which package provides the library
you need. You would then need to download a relatively up-to-date MANIFEST.bz2
file from the appropriate tree and run a command like bzgrep on them to find
the file.

update-manifest is the equivalent of downloading the latest MANIEST.bz2 file,
while manifest-search is equivalent to running the bzgrep commands on the
downloaded files.

Two common questions:

Do I really need to run update-manifest before I try to use the manifest-search
operation?  Not really. Downloading and processing MANIFEST.bz2 files may take
some time and maybe the library you are looking for has been present for a long
time, so you could try to use the current "manifest database" that was created
the last time you ran "update-manifest" before running the same operation
again.

Why do I need to run update-manifest and why are not those files downloaded
when I run the update operation? Because searching for files in the manifest
database is an infrequent operation, and downloading and creating the manifest
database takes a good amount of seconds. It makes sense to skip downloading
those files every time you run the update operation, and only update the
manifest database on request.

Also see: local-search, update-manifest.

