Hugo 雨果5d ago
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

Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ 5d ago

@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 ^^).

Show threada sauna tent would fix me5d ago
@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?
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ 5d ago
@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.
Show threadHugo 雨果4d ago
@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`.
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ 4d ago
@whynothugo @eal service is a wrapper/alias of rc-service though
Show threadwitch_t *navi
@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)
Mar 26 at 10:50amWeb
Show threadHugo 雨果4d ago
@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.