pacman and friends

Source

Let's have a look at what occupies these 21 GB in my /dev/sda3.

In Arch Linux, one may use pacman directly to get this information, but there are at least two more convenient ways which lead essentially to the same results:

expac -H M '%m\t%n' | sort -h

or even shorter

pacgraph -c | sort -h

The result of the latter on my system is:

1198MB urbanterror
920MB xonotic
856MB nexuiz
514MB sauerbraten
496MB warsow
486MB texlive-fontsextra
399MB openarena
362MB freecad
280MB quake4
214MB fpc

The extra fonts for TeX is the only package I really need from this top ten of storage hogs.

For more visually oriented users, pacgraph offers an interesting view:

pacgraph  -b "#333333" -t "#FFFFFF" -d "#FFFFBB"

pacgraph

I looked closely and discovered mono. WTF do I need mono for?

[cobra@blackvelvet ~]# whoneeds mono
Packages that depend on [mono]
  nant
  sparkleshare

[cobra@blackvelvet ~]# pactree -r -d 1 mono
|--mono
   |--dbus-sharp
   |--gtk-sharp-2
   |--nant
   |--ndesk-dbus

Or graphically:

pacgraph -b "#333333" -t "#ffffff" -d "#ffffbb" -i "#ff0000" "#00ff00" "#0000ff" mono

whymono?

Ah, sparkleshare! By the way: did I actually install all optional dependencies for sparkleshare?

[cobra@blackvelvet Documents]$ pacman -T $(expac -Q '%o' sparkleshare)
python2-nautilus

Naturally not, as I don't use nautilus.

Sparkleshare is located on the AUR and needs to be compiled whenever a new version is released. That's not a problem for my future desktop, which will be distinguished by a very potent CPU. 😄

For a netbook like my Mini, however, the compilation of larger programs takes time and drains the battery. Let's see how many packages on my current desktop are from the AUR:

[cobra@blackvelvet Documents]$ pacman -Qqm | wc -l
64

Too many, if I'd plan to install my system on a netbook! I'm thus still hesitating to install Archbang on my Mini...

And what about the rest, i.e., packages explicitly installed via the official repositories?

[cobra@blackvelvet Documents]$ pacman -Qqe | grep -vx "$(pacman -Qqg base)" | grep -vx "$(pacman -Qqm)" | wc -l
272

The lists with these 336 packages which I have installed in addition to the base system will be very useful for a painless installation of my new system sometime at the end of this year.