Bowing to pacman

pkraw · 2007-06-15 17:26:59

Just few minutes ago, when I needed to install some gstreamer codecs, I thought to myself - hey, let's try this:

pacman -S gstreamer0.10-{ffmpeg,flac,musepack,faad}

Then I pressed ENTER and saw... It worked!

I've used many package managers - including apt-get (also aptitude and wajig), poldek, yum and smart. And now I've no doubt - pacman is as functional as all of them (sometimes even more!), but it's much more simple to use too. This leads it to the first place in my personal rank.

Keep going, pacman!

Ramses de Norre · 2007-06-15 17:30:41

In fact, that array construct should be handled by the shell before pacman gets called and thus AFAIK should work with any package manager as long as they don't block the shell stuff in any strange way.

pkraw · 2007-06-15 20:56:13

Mhmm, I decided to check it and so I have to admit you're right.

[pkraw@faerun ~]$ echo gstreamer0.10-{ffmpeg,flac,musepack,faad}
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-flac gstreamer0.10-musepack gstreamer0.10-faad

One more thing to know about - but it of course doesn't change my point of view when it comes to package managers.

KerowynM · 2007-06-17 04:45:13

I have to bow to pacman myself just now. I always cursed forgetting to quote searches with pacman -Ss and getting odd results. But I suddenly found myself happy that I could pacman -Ss package1 package2 ... and then just remove the s to go ahead and confirm what I was just looking at...

pacman > all

antonik · 2007-06-18 19:30:42

Agreed. pacman > all

I just begun using it a few days ago, while I have been using gentoo since 2003. now emerge is just way to slow, a simple emerge -av package takes minutes to compute and suggest package, while pacman -S package goes in seconds.

Also I dont have to compile everything and select a bunch of use flags which in the end dont make such a big difference, and still my archlinux is just as fast, if not faster, than my gentoo.

All this + kdemod = bowdown for arch.

finferflu · 2007-06-22 23:08:38

Actually I really don't get how people could stay there and wait for a package to compile for all that time?
That's the reason why I think I will never even try Gentoo and the like. Apart from optimizing the installation for your system I can't see any practical reason to use it. You may gain in responsiveness, but you lose all that time to set up your system (I am not flaming, I am just really curious since I've seen a lot of people use and love Gentoo, while I can't even see myself trying it, especially now that I've found Arch). I've seen that Arch provides a way to recompile the packages to optimize them, but leaving you with the excellent pacman.

Coming back on topic, I've seen that Arch handles everything way faster than apt, I am sure it's not my perception. Also it's very simple to use. I'm not an experienced user, but so far Arch is pure excellence for my taste. And pacman is one of the reasons.

shining · 2007-06-23 13:20:51

finferflu wrote:

Actually I really don't get how people could stay there and wait for a package to compile for all that time?
That's the reason why I think I will never even try Gentoo and the like. Apart from optimizing the installation for your system I can't see any practical reason to use it. You may gain in responsiveness, but you lose all that time to set up your system (I am not flaming, I am just really curious since I've seen a lot of people use and love Gentoo, while I can't even see myself trying it, especially now that I've found Arch). I've seen that Arch provides a way to recompile the packages to optimize them, but leaving you with the excellent pacman.

I don't like Gentoo (maybe since I found arch), but the idea is you don't wait when your box is compiling, you just run emerge, then you do other stuff. If you need to keep using your computer for stuff which require some cpu power, then you just give emerge low priority.
There are often arch users who complain about optional dependencies of some packages they don't want. In some (many?) cases, the only way is to recompile the app for disabling these deps, and for example providing an additional package, but this isn't ideal.

Coming back on topic, I've seen that Arch handles everything way faster than apt, I am sure it's not my perception. Also it's very simple to use. I'm not an experienced user, but so far Arch is pure excellence for my taste. And pacman is one of the reasons.

Really, on the performance side, apt is much much better than pacman in my experience.
But IMO, it's also much much easier to build packages for pacman than deb packages.
So I can't tell which one I prefer

raymano · 2007-06-23 15:16:15

In Arch you can always remove the packages you don't need with pacman -Rd. This by-passes dependency checking. If you think you don't need a package that's been installed because of another packages dependency, you can remove it this way. You can also install packages with pacman -Sd which by-passes dependency checks at install time. Then you can install only the dependent packages you need.

I do believe that in general pacman is the best package manager out there. The only thing missing is a good graphical installer that works with pacman3.

shining · 2007-06-23 15:51:44

raymano wrote:

In Arch you can always remove the packages you don't need with pacman -Rd. This by-passes dependency checking. If you think you don't need a package that's been installed because of another packages dependency, you can remove it this way. You can also install packages with pacman -Sd which by-passes dependency checks at install time. Then you can install only the dependent packages you need.

This won't break the packages ? I thought they needed to be recompiled..
When an app is compiled with support for some library, it generally fails to run if the library is missing at runtime.

Seems like this isn't the case for all, since some packages have optional dependencies that you can install later. But is that always possible?

finferflu · 2007-06-23 17:00:27

shining wrote:

Really, on the performance side, apt is much much better than pacman in my experience.
But IMO, it's also much much easier to build packages for pacman than deb packages.
So I can't tell which one I prefer

Sorry, what do you mean by performance side? I know I am not an experienced user, so what I noticed was just the search/install speed, which in pacman is better than apt, so far.

shining · 2007-06-23 17:13:51

finferflu wrote:

Sorry, what do you mean by performance side? I know I am not an experienced user, so what I noticed was just the search/install speed, which in pacman is better than apt, so far.

I don't know what to say, besides asking the obvious : you're comparing on the same hardware, right?
And similar installation, like same filesystem, etc.. ?

finferflu · 2007-06-23 18:43:08

shining wrote:

finferflu wrote:
Sorry, what do you mean by performance side? I know I am not an experienced user, so what I noticed was just the search/install speed, which in pacman is better than apt, so far.
I don't know what to say, besides asking the obvious : you're comparing on the same hardware, right?
And similar installation, like same filesystem, etc.. ?

The only difference is that I had ext3 filesystem for Debian (and I have ext3 for Ubuntu on my other partition, but well, apt is slightly slower than Debian on Ubuntu) and I have ext2 for Arch, does it make much of a difference?

Arch Linux

#1 2007-06-15 17:26:59

Bowing to pacman

#2 2007-06-15 17:30:41

Re: Bowing to pacman

#3 2007-06-15 20:56:13

Re: Bowing to pacman

#4 2007-06-17 04:45:13

Re: Bowing to pacman

#5 2007-06-18 19:30:42

Re: Bowing to pacman

#6 2007-06-22 23:08:38

Re: Bowing to pacman

#7 2007-06-23 13:20:51

Re: Bowing to pacman

#8 2007-06-23 15:16:15

Re: Bowing to pacman

#9 2007-06-23 15:51:44

Re: Bowing to pacman

#10 2007-06-23 17:00:27

Re: Bowing to pacman

#11 2007-06-23 17:13:51

Re: Bowing to pacman

#12 2007-06-23 18:43:08

Re: Bowing to pacman

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