pacman confusion
 

Not new to Linux but new to Arch so I'm familiar with Debian package management but pacman has more of a learning curve than I expected.

I installed Arch to a Beaglebone Black & that went well. Now I want to install opencv & I'm puzzling over some output that I get from pacman.

pacman -Sp opencv | grep libgl tells me:
so I interpret that as meaning that opengl (or one of its dependencies) depends on mesa-libgl

but when I try to go ahead and install with
sudo pacman -S opencv it comes back with
So why is pacman offering me those other providers, and where can I go to find out what those cryptic names in 2 - 5 mean?

Well, I'm guessing that the choices under Repository alarm are for devices with Vivante GPUs and i.MX6 quad core processors so none of them are useful for a BBB.

Still it would be nice to know exactly what those other choices are, where they are, where to find some info about them etc. Googling mostly brings up other people's blind guesses and unanswered questions.

Kinda begs some work on a decent gui package management system.

I have pcurses https://github.com/schuay/pcurses working, and hackked some features into it.

Anyone have a LAMP setup to donate? Web based. Type in db queries and get upgrade suggestions. Updated daily. Basic js/php. Tree/panel/info display. Easy.

Thanks, good to know about pcurses. Brings back memories of the agony of learning dselect. ;)

The others won't help right now as I'm not using a DE.

... in my experience pacman will offer these kind of choices from time to time. Although this is far from a perfect answer, unless I know for sure that I need one of the secondary options, I go with the primary. I also admit I've never heard of the "alarm" repository, whereas "extra" is common. Others here may be more knowledgeable with respect to that ...

Cheers,

alarm probably stands for archlinux arm - which is a port of archlinux, so not archlinux proper. just saying.

anyhow, pacman expects a little more user participation, i consider that a feature and not a lack thereof.
i always felt empowered by it, not agonised.

also, the github repo advertised here hasn't seen any updates for 3 years. well i wouldn't use it anyway. pacman works well enough for me.

(and yes, i noticed that this thread is old. seems i subscribed to it back then)

You may like Yaourt. Its a Pacman manager. Eeeeasy.


Best 'o luck.

Incorrect, it's an AUR helper

So sorry for the mistake. Should probly' have the correct it on their website as well where, on it's manual page (https://archlinux.fr/man/yaourt.8.html) under "Description", it describes itself thus :

"Yaourt is a Pacman frontend with alot of features".

But in the end ,"How great is the difference between eh and oh? What abysmal nonsense it is!". Thats a real old Chinese way of saying don't sweat the small s*...
Whatever you call it, it works. Give it a go. Manpage is right up above. Call it an installamajigg or Mikuni for all I care. It (mostly) works.

indeed