pl could more easily write a gui (or other tools) in? Like python maybe. That way, anyone can write pacman related tools without reinventing the wheel every single time. Seeing all these tools either calling pacman directly, or redoing all the work themselves by parsing the config and metainfo files make me cry.
I agree. Personally I think that the main reason for missing GUI is simple: ArchLinux users don't really need that. And we are not motivated in developing GUIs neither. As a programmer, I think that libalpm is more than programmer friendly. However, we don't have full documentation yet... I agree with vmiklos, that missing config parser can also be a small reason here. Independent from this, personally I would use an external "powerful" config parser/WRITER library (no, not XML;-). In my own projects I'm using scconf: http://www.opensc-project.org/pam_pkcs11/browser/trunk/src/scconf, but that is not suitable here (missing Include directive). Bye