What is Portage File List?
Portage File List collects which files are installed by which ebuild on users machines. It shares this data publicly for searching/browsing.
It allows user to search for files that are not installed on their system and figure out which ebuild they need to install in order to obtain it.
Let's make a short example: You want to use the command brctl, but it's not installed on your system. Portage offers no way for you to figure out the name of the ebuild. You have to guess. Or you can search PFL and hope that someone else has installed brctl and thus PFL knows which ebuild does that.
Try it: query Portagefilelist for brctl
Apparently the ebuild is net-misc/bridge-utils.
Current status of the data
You can help
PFL needs Portage data from your system. The more ebuilds you have installed the better. The more exotic ebuilds you have installed the better. Every Gentoo user can help!
emerge app-portage/pfl
This will install a cron job that submits new data to the PFL servers every week. Don't worry, your privacy mains protected as we are not collecting anything else than portage data, and we don't store who sends what.
Feedback
Please visit PFL Github repository for development.
You have found a bug or have suggestions for improvement? Let me know!