Centos – how can i install pacman (Archlinux Package manager) with its repo (AUR) in CentOS7

arch linuxcentospackage-managementpacman

I am a Arch user and I love it, but I have to use CentOS in my office and at my laptop to comply with my office policy. So I want to use CentOS 7 as my desktop and I also don't want to leave Arch Linux completely. So is there a way by which I can install pacman in CentOS 7 and have test of two different distros?

Best Answer

You can install and use pacman but you can't use AUR repo in CentOS 7

Arch users having to temporarily deal with another Linux distribution can use pacapt, a simple wrapper around other package managers.

To install pacapt run the following commands:

sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/pacapt \
https://github.com/icy/pacapt/raw/ng/pacapt
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/pacapt
sudo ln -sv /usr/local/bin/pacapt /usr/local/bin/pacman || true

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Linux – Package management strategy with Pacman

The most likely reason you are seeing packages with pacman -Qe that you don't remember installing is that they were part of a "group" (like base-devel, etc) that you installed.

Side Note: I have personally also been looking for a while to switch a package from "explicit" to "implicit" (and even vice-versa) without reinstalling it, it even taking a package I installed explicitly to get another package working and turn it into a dependency of that package (again without reinstalling).

arch-linux – How to Delete Old Packages Installed by Pacman in Arch Linux

No, pacman doesn't remove old packages from your cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg) so, over time, it can fill up.

You can adopt two approaches to clearing the cache: the brute force one with pacman -Sc:

-c, --clean
Remove packages that are no longer installed from the cache as well as currently unused sync databases to free up disk space. When pacman downloads packages, it saves them in a cache directory. In addition, databases are saved for every sync DB you download from, and are not deleted even if they are removed from the configuration file pacman.conf(5). Use one --clean switch to only remove packages that are no longer installed; use two to remove all files from the cache. In both cases, you will have a yes or no option to remove packages and/or unused downloaded databases.

Or, for a more nuanced approach, you can use one of the utilities that ships with pacman-contrib, paccache:

paccache is a flexible pacman cache cleaning utility, which has numerous options to help control how much, and what, is deleted from any directory containing pacman package tarballs.

By default, paccache -r will remove all but the last three versions of an installed package, but you can change this number with the -k, --keep switch. There is also a -d, --dryrun switch to preview your changes. You can also use the -m, --move <dir> option to move the packages to a separate directory of your choice. See paccache -h or paccache --help for all the switches.

There are a number of utilities in the pacman-contrib package to assist with package management, it is worth looking though them all and gaining an understanding of how they work and can make running Arch much easier. You can see the full list with:

pacman -Ql pacman-contrib | awk -F"[/ ]" '/\/usr\/bin/ {print $NF}'

Best Answer

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Linux – Package management strategy with Pacman

arch-linux – How to Delete Old Packages Installed by Pacman in Arch Linux

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