Improve 'chisel find' to list all missing slices I have to create myself (and dump all available for $my_package)

[taurus-forever]

Hi,

I have $my_package I want to chisel (with 388 apt dependencies):

> apt-rdepends $my_package | wc -l
338

I had to run 100+ times to find all available slices:

> chisel find --release ubuntu-24.04 libuuid1
> chisel find --release ubuntu-24.04 libcap2
...

It would be great to have something like:

> chisel find --release ubuntu-24.04 --rdepends $my_package --missing
libldap-common
libxxhash0
...

the same way it can generate for me list of available slices (moreover if dependency has one slice only):

> chisel find --release ubuntu-24.04 --rdepends $my_package --available
libp11-kit0_libs
libffi8_libs
libtasn1-6_libs
...

So, I can drag&drop them into my yaml file. Tnx!

[cjdcordeiro]

(discussed offline - sounds like a plausible feature request. fyi @letFunny )

[letFunny]

> chisel find --release ubuntu-24.04 --rdepends $my_package --missing
  libldap-common
  libxxhash0
...

This is an interesting idea, I wonder it should be a feature request for Chisel itself or maybe for some helper script for creating slices in the same way that we have tools at https://github.com/canonical/rocks-toolbox. Chisel at the moment does not attempt to solve dependencies from the upstream archives and, in fact, it doesn't even know about them. That is on purpose; we want Chisel to be self-contained and only care about its dependencies (i.e. essential slices in the SDF files). That is why we think a notion of upstream dependencies would feel a bit alien because we do not want to grow to a subset of apt.

With that said, this can definitely be a helper script that queries Chisel find and combines the output with Chisel info. The only problem I see there, and it's something that might be worth adding to Chisel, is that it might take too long because we are essentially validating the release on each command. If that ends up being the bottleneck then we should definitely talk about it.