Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

The game you're thinking of is 'Pac-Man' (hyphenated).

This is a package management tool for ArchLinux. Similar to 'yum' for RHEL. Or Debians 'apt-*', 'dpkg' tools.

It also work on Windows, it's what MSYS uses for package management, convenient to avoid having to install CYGIN or using virtualisation.

msys uses pacman? Is there another msys than the one at mingw.org[0] ? I believe you but I just can't find any reference to pacman there.

[0] http://www.mingw.org/wiki/msys

I googled 'msys pacman' and it seems that msys2 uses pacman: http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

He means MSYS2 https://msys2.github.io/

It's great, it has a wonderful collection of libs, sometimes it can feel a little bit too cutting edge, but after the stagnation of Mingw I'm not complaining about that.

It's open source software so it can (given enough time and motivation) be ported to whatever platform you wanted. Because of this I think there's a few other OSs / distro forks that also use pacman. But primarily, `pacman` is developed by ArchLinux maintainers for ArchLinux.

It is, for sure, a little bit confusing :) http://p.fu86.de/1454938855-32650.png

Not that confusing really - the two applications couldn't be more different in use.

"Pacman" is abbreviated from "package manager" while "Pac-Man" is derived from "Puck Man", named so because the yellow avatar looked like a hockey puck. (the reason for the name change is quite interesting too[1]).

While it's true that the ArchLinux devs do play on the name similarities (there's even an easter egg to turn the `pacman` progress bar into a little Pac-Man eating up ASCII pills[2]), I think most people who might confuse the two wouldn't be familiar with the package manager anyway. And those who are familiar with `pacman` are likely technical enough to tell the difference.

[1] Renamed because of worries that some US audiences might vandalise the Puck into Fuck.

[2] Put 'ILoveCandy' (without quotes) under the [options] in /etc/pacman.conf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com