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Discussion on: What are your thoughts on multiples package managers?

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Dian Fay

Arch Linux's package management ecosystem is a big part of why it's my favorite general-purpose distro. Anyone can create a package for the Arch User Repository (AUR) assuming the name hasn't been taken, and there are "AUR helpers" which wrap the built-in package manager (pacman) to download and install packages from both the official repos and the AUR. Popular AUR packages can be moved into the official repos as well. I've written my own AUR packages, for example to install the hostess hosts file management tool.

I still use other package managers for dependency management: npm, Maven, occasionally pip, gem and bundler, cpanm, pgxnclient. But I try to avoid installing tools through them.

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Quentin Sonrel

Yeah, that's the one reason why I miss Arch (I used it for a while but came back to Debian), AUR has pretty much everything.

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rhymes

Apparently I discover tools through your comments :D ripgrep and now hostess.