Pkg Find Function

[tknopp]

In my perspective it is really great that Julia ships with an build-in package manager!

One issue with this distributed approach is that it is sometimes hard to figure out, whether a specific function has been already implemented in some package.

For instance I was just looking for a median filter implementation and did not really know how to look for it and ended up asking on julia-user.

I think in these situations it would be very helpful if there would be a function

Pkg.find_function("median")

Would this be feasible?

[johnmyleswhite]

This requires that we build an index of all function names in all packages -- and ship that index with METADATA.jl. It's certainly possible, but it's potentially problematic: you might ship a lot of data and still provide no value to users if the packages don't use the function name you thought of.

[johnmyleswhite]

One thing we could do is make a website for Julia's package that offers this functionality as an API call. That will keep excess data off disk, while allowing calls to this function in the REPL if you have internet connectivity.

[tknopp]

I was also thinking that it would make more sense to make this in form of a remote procedure call. It would also be equivalently great to just have a searchable website that provides an index with all functions.

[johnmyleswhite]

I think we should definitely build a pkg.julialang.org. Some element of centralization will make the Julia package system seem much more impressive to non-users.

[nolta]

pkg.julialang.org exists now.

[ivarne]

But it does not store a list of all exported identifiers for a global function search. Still I agree in closing thus issue, because it can be developed totally independent of base julia.

[tknopp]

While this certainly is not the priority number one issue I cannot understand why this is not considered to be useful. At this point there is no way to determine whether a particular function like median is implemented in a package.

@ivarne I can't follow your argument. Isn't this very very closely related to the Pkg manager? (which lives in base)