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by johanbev 5339 days ago
That's just how CLI apps work, there is nothing elitist about it. Its "cd" and "ls -la" and "cat", not "change-directory," "list-directory long-format everything" and so on. The learning curve might be steep, but it's well worth it, especially for those of us who "live" in a shell.

In the particular case of pacman, I really like the design of the arguments, in particular the top level ones. -S is for syncing, -R is for removing, and -Q is for querying and so on. Nice!

1 comments

Yes, but why rename install to syncing and search to query? Why not just call it install and make it -i for install and -s for search which is still search. I think that is what the OP is trying to say.
Searching isn't the same as querying. -Q is for operations dealing on the _local_ repository. -S synchronizes your local repository with the remote repository. In a way installing could very well be -Si (-S --install), but installing is the default action in -S mode instead. Pacman is maybe somewhat idiosyncratic, but I find it very useful and simple once you get the basics.
Oh, i used it. Found it delightful, actually I am yet to encounter a very bad package management system. They are all really good since I started using linux.