1. Which Pacman?

This is the level 256 of Pac-Man (the arcade game):

...but the rest of this page is about pacman (8), the package manager of Arch Linux, and on how to use pacman from eev without losing focus.

2. The story

This story is easier to tell in the wrong order: beginning, then end, then middle.

2.1. The beginning: Lynx and Debian

In this story "Bruno" is Bruno Macedo, who is probably the only very advanced user of eev who is not me; and he uses Arch Linux. So: one day, in 2024, we were chatting about technical things, and discussing ways to point to a specific point of a web page, and I mentioned Lynx; Bruno didn't know what it was, he googled for it for a few seconds, and he saw that it could be many things; we moved to other subjects, and we forgot about it.

I use Debian, and eev has lots of tools for doing things in Debian. For example, `M-h M-d' generates a temporary buffer like the one in the first screenshot below; and we can use that to obtain information about a package `foobar' - that may be installed or not! - and it contains an eepitch block for installing `foobar'...

...and if we invoke `M-h M-d' with a part of a filename, say, `bin/foobar', instead of a package name, then we can use this line,

# (find-sh "apt-file search bin/foobar")

to discover which Debian packages contain files with the string `bin/foobar' in their names, and install the right one.

2.2. The end: `find-pacman-links'

2.3. The middle: rationale

2.4. Backstory

a friend of mine - bruno macedo, who uses archlinux... ...helped me to rewrite `find-pacman-links'. the new version is here, (find-wgeta-elisp "http://anggtwu.net/eev-current/eev-tlinks.el" "find-pacman-links") but not on git eev yet. Are you interested in doing something similar for guix? Here's how I explained the motivation behind the find-distropkgmanager-links to him... Months ago I showed him a script that had a call to "lynx" at some point. Nowadays lynx can mean so many things that he tried to discover what it was, during, say, 30s, then gave up, and forgot... if we already had a good find-pacman-links then he could have done this: (find-pacman-links "bin/lynx") one of the lines in the temporary buffer would be something that would look in all packages that pacman knew, and would report all packages containing a file that had the string "bin/lynx" in its full pathname... and he would find that the package that he was looking for was called "lynx". Suppose that it was called lynx-foo, to make things more interesting. Then by changing the first line of the temporay buffer and running (find-pacman-links "lynx-foo") some lines of the new temporary buffer would give info about lynx-foo - one line would show its description, another would show all files in that package - and an eepitch block would let him install lynx-foo with few keystrokes. So the path between "what is this program, lynx?" and getting info about its package and installing it would take just one minute, and requiring much attention... he wouldn't get very distracted from what he thinking before. That's the idea =)