thoughts about pacman --groups

[goyalyashpal]

$ pacman -Qh
  -g, --groups         view all members of a package group
  -l, --list           list the files owned by the queried package

$ pacman -Sh
  -g, --groups         view all members of a package group
                       (-gg to view all groups and members)

• -Qgg is valid too, t'd be nice to have that line in the -Qh help (as it is in -Sh)

Some other miscellaneous thoughts about the -g in pacman

-gg show groups and members

• is there any way to list these in a tree view say with pactree smth?
  (would help with easy separation of different groups)
• any way to list only groups, not their members?
• and some --info like view for groups?

$ pacman -Sig editors
error: invalid option: '--info' and '--groups' may not be used together

Details on question about the --info view

like showing the details of a group in the way details are shown for packages?

At least following 3 fields maybe relevant:
"Provides" (for members), "Download Size", "Installed Size"

$ pacman -Si nnn
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : bash  ncurses  libreadline
Optional Deps   : atool: for more archive formats
                  libarchive: for more archive formats
                  zip: for zip archive format
                  unzip: for zip archive format
                  rclone: mount remotes
Download Size   : 63.35 KiB
Installed Size  : 114.17 KiB

$ pacman -Sg editors
editors emacs
editors nano
editors vim

Imagined is smth like:

$ pacman -Sig editors
Provides        : emacs  nano  vim
Download Size   : 63.35 KiB
Installed Size  : 114.17 KiB

---

Tangentials:

• What are other packages and tools for aiding with pacman
  i know only 2 so far: pactree and pacboy (from pactoys)
• I call the view used in --info to be "form" or "semi-tabular" view (contrast with "linear" or "tree" view etc from pactree)
  is there a technical name for this view? or what will u call this? 😅
  Edit: Yes, two-pane view i guess.

[lazka]

(Note that we don't develop pacman, it's developed by Arch Linux: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman)

• is there any way to list these in a tree view say with pactree smth?
  (would help with easy separation of different groups)

• any way to list only groups, not their members?

You could do pacman -Qg | cut -d" " -f1 | sort | uniq

• and some --info like view for groups?

I don't think so.

pacman mainly operates on packages, and groups are just a field of packages.

See:

• https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman/Tips_and_tricks

[goyalyashpal]

As for the other tools thing:

• this "updating" page (msys2) provides several commands - several of which i think are provided within pacman itself
  pacdiff , paccache, pacman-key
• this above pacman tips/tricks (arch) lists some more:
  expac, pacgraph, pacolog, pakbak-git
pacutils (pacreport , paccheck),
  powerpill
• wiki/pacman: pacman-contrib contains various tools too

$ pacman -Ss man
msys/namcap 3.3.1-4
    A Pacman package analyzer

<other interesting ones:>
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-winico 0.6-3
    Tk extension for Windows for enhanced icon handling and manipulation of an icon in the Windows taskbar and system tray (mingw-w64)
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-wxsvg-wx3.2 1.5.24-1
    A C++ library to create, manipulate and render SVG files (mingw-w64)
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-xmlstarlet 1.6.1-1
    Command-line XML toolkit
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-hexyl 0.12.0-1
    A command-line hex viewer
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-highs 1.4.2-1
    High performance linear optimization software (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-hyperfine 1.15.0-1
    A command-line benchmarking tool (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-imagemagick 7.1.0.62-1
    An image viewing/manipulation program (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-irrlicht 1.8.5-1
    An open source high performance realtime 3D graphics engine (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libunistring 1.1-1
    Library for manipulating Unicode strings and C strings. (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-lldb 15.0.7-2
    Next generation, high-performance debugger (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-lsd 0.23.1-1
    The next gen ls command (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-manim 0.17.2-1
    Animation engine for explanatory math videos (community edition) (mingw-w64)
ucrt64/mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mimalloc 2.0.9-1
    General-purpose allocator with excellent performance characteristics (mingw-w64)
msys/axel 2.17.11-2
    Light command line download accelerator for Linux and Unix