Interview with Arch Linux Core Team

Provataki writes "OSNews posted a juicy interview with the Arch Linux core team discussing everything about their promising distro, including their original package manager 'pacman,' their competition, their plans and more."

Re:I hate Arch Linux.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This story is not up to Roland Piquepaille's high standards.

Good distro

[dimss]

I've tried Arch last year. Mostly good distro but their i18n support was very poor. First, I have to rebuild ncurses with utf-8 support (Looks like this one is fixed by judd). Second, glibc comes with reduced locale set. I had to build ru_RU.KOI8-R myself. Debian, for example, provides nice frontend for doing this. Slackware comes with huge number of locales by default.

naming

[sfcat]

Why does every FOSS package name tells us nothing about what it does? Pacman, that's not going to confuse anyone. Not that it really matters, it just occured to me. I guess it is better than Kensho, a product that I worked on last year, the name doesn't actually translate directly into any English word but it kinda means serenity.

Naming is Hard!

[Makarakalax]

Why does every FOSS package name tells us nothing about what it does?

Pacman stands for Package Manager.

But to defend less well named products, it is very difficult to name things, and extremely difficult to name things well. Also frankly it is far more important to pick a name that is memorable and easy to pronounce. It doesn't take long to figure out what something does (man pacman, pacman --help, google for pacman etc.), but if you can't remember it next time you need to use it, then the name is useles

Re:Naming is Hard!

[sfcat]

Google does ok. Not having a reference to what you do in your name means you get more word of mouth. People have to ask "What does that do?", and straight away they are interested.

I was just pointing something out, don't be so eager to insult. I googled for Pacman, and you know what, all the results were for the game, duh? I've been using Linux for 12 years now so I know about the names uses and yes, I could figure out what pacman does. But that doesn't mean most people can.

Yes, naming is hard, but

Re:Naming is Hard!

[Makarakalax]

I'm not sure why you thought I was trying to insult you.

It's true that software are tools, and you search for the tool by name, and you hope the name will reveal the tool's use. However it isn't that big a deal. All GUIs nowadays have a description field, Google will help you if you search well (eg "pacman ArchLinux"), man pacman would also help, so will "man pacman".

The best thing a name can be is memorable and catchy. Car manufacturers have long since given up on contextual names, they do fine.

No I've

Re:naming

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't been using Unix systems long enough to understand this. Look up the history behind commands such as cat, rm, ls, etc. pacman fits in perfectly, and thinking "PACkage MANager" isn't that hard.

Great distro...

[deggy]

I've been using arch for about 18 months now and it's a great distro - I like to keep bleeding edge and it allows me to use all the latest libs with ease.
I aggree that it's not for beginners, and still takes considerable user effort at times but it's got a sensible conf file layout and syntax and provides complete control over the OS, it much harder to FUBAR that a Mandrake or a Redhat.

D.