ubuntu package management question

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 11 Dec 2020 09:50:12 -0500 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> if you have it, and you wanted to  know it
> 
>  Â Â Â  Â Â Â  dpkg -S `which qmake`
> qtchooser: /usr/bin/qmake
> 
> if you don't have it, apart from google , you can type the command, 
> ubuntu often then tells you the package name.

Not in this case.  There is actually a file /usr/bin/qmake, which is a symlink 
to qtchooser, which when run gives the error:

gollum% /usr/bin/qmake
qmake: could not exec '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/qmake': No such file 
or directory

Which suggests that qtchooser is wanting qt4's qmake, which is NOT what I want
-- I have an app that needs qt5, not qt4. I do have (some?) of the qt5
libraries (don't know for sure if I have the -dev libs, but I think I can deal
with that).

For some things the "hack" of typing the command to get the package name is 
does not work.  And it is really tiresome to have do web searches, esp. since 
often as not, the results are often not usefull or are for a different version 
or are outdated.  The really should oughta be a proper package management 
utility for this.  Why isn't there such a utility?  Maybe I'll hack some quick 
and dirty tool.

> 
> On 12/11/20 9:44 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
> > If one wants to install some program or library and knows the name of the
> > program or library how does one find out what the *package name* is?  Is there
> > no utility like 'yum search' (available on RedHat flavored systems)?
> >
> > Specificly, I need qmake for QT5 installed on a Ubuntu 18.04 system.  What
> > package do I install?  dpkg-query is no help.  Or must I search through the
> > _Package files in /var/lib/apt/lists/?  Is there no better way? Has noone
> > created a utility for this?
> >
> 

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