[pacman-dev] Starting Pacman development

[Matthew Sexton]

On Friday, September 6, 2019 4:51:04 AM EDT Jelle van der Waa wrote:
> On 09/05/19 at 10:42pm, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> > 
> > Does anything in particular about pacman or package managers in general
> > interest you? That is generally the best way to start. :)
> > 
> > If you just want some suggestions for uncontroversial bug fixes to look
> > at, I could try to find something. :)
> 
> This bug seems to be an easy candidate to me:
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58391

Jelle: That looks like something I could probably handle. >_> I'm going to 
look into getting that done.

Eli:
My general motivation is that I am the type of person that likes knowing how 
things work, and why they work the way that they do. Pacman is a tool that I 
use daily, and compared to other package managers I've used on other distros, 
it's probably the most powerful and feature-rich. (That's including some of 
the 'scripts' and add-ons like pacman-contrib and makepkg) 

I've run through Linux From Scratch twice now, and the first time I got all the 
way to the end and realized that package management is not only a nice 
feature, it's absolutely REQUIRED unless you really enjoy manually hunting 
down dependencies and compiling a dozen applications just to update one. I 
love the fact that, not only does pacman handle all of that for me, but I can 
feed pacman my own packages and it handles them just like any other. I don't 
have to do very much thinking, and that's pretty much the gold standard for a 
great tool. Useable without thinking about using it. 

I thought I understood how Pacman works. And in a most general sense, I 
suppose i do. Looking at the source dir, there's a src file for every 
'function' of pacman. But peeking inside, it's a rabbit hole of alpm calls and 
stuff I don't yet understand. And that intrigues me. So that, right there, is a 
good reason for me to dive in.

Also, I enjoy being useful. Pacman is a console application, which I'm 
familiar with. I couldn't code a useful GUI to save my life. So pacman is an 
application I believe I -could- get 'intimately familiar' with. And I truly 
want to help and support the Arch community in whatever ways I'm able. (I just 
don't know where to begin. I troll the IRC, the forums, maintain a few AUR 
packages that don't really get used or updated.. I'm not actually -doing- 
anything. I like -doing-.)

Plus, I think it was you who said "If you like breaking things, become a 
pacman developer. You can break lots of things."
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