Integrate `fpm-search` into `fpm`?

[minhqdao]

After going through the tutorials on the fpm website and learning about searching the registry for suitable packages with fpm search, I wondered if it made sense to integrate the functionality of fpm-search into the main fpm repo because searching seems to be an integral part of fpm to me, similar to apt search or brew info.

You then wouldn't need to install another package to enable it and I believe it would also increase the maintainability of fpm search when it is located in the same repo.

[urbanjost]

plug-ins like fpm-search and fpm-man were purposely separated out into individual projects to keep fpm concentrated on its core functionality and to allow parallel development. It helps prevent bloat of the core program as well, as many functions like these require a considerable number of additional modules or libraries, and can also be system-dependent.

The idea was to develop an API for fpm itself that the plugins could use to access the build model information, and to allow a way to list the plugins available and to possibly have an fpm command like "add plugin" and "add package" and have the packages added to your fpm.toml file, and have the plugins pulled, built, and installed; for example.

The plugin concept does not seem to have grown much so far, and not many others have emerged. That being said, it does seem that especially as the number of packages grows that at a minimum the binary package installs should include fpm-search. If you had not noticed if a command starts with "fpm-" you can call it like it was an fpm subcommand:

fpm search
fpm man abs

following that convention it is relatively easy to add a command to list installed plugins; and that a relatively small change to fpm-search would allow you to find plugins too. So once you had fpm-search installed first, you could enter commands
like

fpm search -plugins

see the available plugins, and add them (assuming they can build on your system) with something like

fpm add -plugin fpm-man

for example, and it would do a "git clone" in a scratch directory, and then "fpm install", and then delete the scratch directory,
or pull a binary and install it instead. Leaving out some details, but a lot of it depends on an expanded fpm-search being installed first. So to go in something resembling that direction somehow bundling fpm-search with fpm makes sense to me.