teacup describe

This is a teacup subcommand.

This subcommand provides meta-data information from the teapot repository.

Information about the default output of teacup describe

The default is to provide the information available in the description meta-data. For instance:

$ teacup describe Expect
Entity        Expect

  Description @ http://teapot.activestate.com
          Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as
        telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes
        this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these same
        applications. And by adding Tk, you can also wrap interactive
        applications in X11 GUIs.

The default output has 3 components:

1. The word "entity" and the name of the entity being described.
2. The word "description" and the URL of the teapot site from which the meta-data is coming.
3. The short description stored within teapot.

Note that not all packages stored within teapot have descriptions. In those cases, you might see the following:

 $ teacup describe Tk

Tk is not known

Problems which occurred during the operation: * http://teapot.activestate.com : Tk is not known

An alternate output you might see is:

 $ teacup describe Tk-84

Entity Tk-84

  Description @ http://teapot.activestate.com

In this case, the package name was found, but the short description meta-data was either empty or missing altogether.

Information about the extended output of teacup describe

If you add the --all argument to the subcommand, teacup will report all the meta-data. For example:

$ teacup describe --all Expect
Entity   Expect
Origin @ http://teapot.activestate.com
As::author  : Don Libes
As::origin  : http://expect.nist.gov
            | http://sourceforge.net/projects/expect
            | http://sf.net/projects/expect http://expect.nist.gov
Category    : Automation
Description : Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications
            | such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc.
            | Expect really makes this stuff trivial. Expect is also
            | useful for testing these same applications. And by
            | adding Tk, you can also wrap interactive applications in
            | X11 GUIs.
Entity      : package
License     : Public Domain
Name        : Expect
Platform    : aix-powerpc hpux-parisc linux-glibc2.2-ix86
            | linux-glibc2.3-ix86 linux-glibc2.3-x86_64
            | macosx-universal solaris2.10-ix86 solaris2.6-sparc
            | solaris2.8-sparc win32-ix86
Require     : {Tcl 8.4}
Subject     : automation interactive automation interactive pty
            | pseudo tty
Summary     : Automating interactive applications
Version     : 5.43 5.43.0 5.44.1 5.44.1.1 5.44.1.2 5.44.1.3 5.44.1.4
            | 5.44.1.5

Most of this meta-data should be self-explanatory.

Other information

The describe subcommand looks for a literal match for the package. If the package is known as Tkzinc , but you type tkzinc, you get an error message saying "tkzinc is not known". Also, as exhibited by the Tk example, above, even if you type the right letter case, if you don't use the exact package name, you will be a "is not known" message.

LV Note that the As::origin metadata attribute is the only link you get to the package's documentation, etc. teacup does not (at least in late 2008), provide installed documentation, demos, etc.