Short reflection looking back at pacman now that it's not part of my daily workflow: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2026/03/26/pacman-syndrome/
Pacman syndrome

@whynothugo Yeah that one is pretty noticeable when you're not a regular Arch user.

Sometimes I feel like emerge and related gentoo tools could also do better but it's still much better than the pacman situation where you always need flags which also don't usually associate nicely to a related word (like ironically pacman -Qo can make sense, but pacman -S and pacman -Qi don't really).

And thankfully stuff like pkg/pkgadd/pkg_add, apt, apk, pkgin, zypper, dnf, yum, … don't have the same design flaws (although they have their share of other flaws ^^).

@lanodan @whynothugo That's one of the worse parts of gentoo for me, actually
portage is conceptually great once you have a mental model of how things should work, but unfortunately the actual tools are fragmented over several loosely related commands and doing the less common operations is frustrating (was it equery or portageq or eix or emerge I need for this? how did I prepare an ebuild for patching again? what flavour of dispatch-conf trouble is worth it this time?
@eal @whynothugo Yeah the split across different sometimes literally third-party commands is kind of a mess, would probably be a lot better if it could be somewhat unified, even just into a common prefix like apt-{get,update,cache} got which would still allow for those third-party tools.
@lanodan @eal The same thing bothers me about #openrc. You have `openrc`, `service`, `rc-update`. They don't seem related, and would make more sense as subcommands of `rc`.
@whynothugo @eal service is a wrapper/alias of rc-service though
@lanodan @whynothugo @eal oh yeah, all our binaries except `openrc` are prefixed with `rc-`

`service` is more of a compat for people with sysvinit muscle memory than anything (and i'm pretty sure we don't ship it ourselves? not sure)
@navi @lanodan @eal Oh yeah, 'service' is a custom Alpine thing, but the comment says it used to be in OpenRC, was dropped, and the link is there for compat.
@whynothugo @lanodan @eal

i have been thinking of making one command, `rc`, but also conflicts with other `rc`'s is a bit of a worry

a better cli ux is being thought of

@navi @whynothugo @eal Isn't the only other rc the Plan9 shell?

Plan9port has the 9 command to launch it's specific commands that exists in a directory like /opt/plan9/bin to avoid such conflicts.

For me, the most annoying thing in openrc CLI usage is:

  • rc-update <action> <service> ...
  • rc-service <service> <action> ...

@navi @whynothugo @lanodan @eal