Jacman 0.4 review

Jacman project is a frontend for pacman software management software that comes with the equally excellent ArchLinux

License: The Apache License 2.0 File size: 0K Developer: Andy Roberts

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Jacman project is a frontend for pacman software management software that comes with the equally excellent ArchLinux. Hopefully the "J" makes it obvious that this is a Java application.

Arch's philosophy is to keep things simple and to keep the user in control. Generally, GUI based configuration tools were deemed "anti-Arch" as they tended to contradict the philosophy by concealing functionality.

Whilst developing Jacman, it has been a design goal to not break the philosophy, but inevitably it does. Whilst Jacman is only a front-end to pacman, it doesn't provide access to all of pacman's functionality.

However, there was a reason for that! I wanted Jacman to provide a visual window for only a subset of common tasks: installing, removing, updating and re-syncing. Some people may like this, as it allows people to quickly explore which packages are available.

Here are some key features of "Jacman":
installing new packages.
updating installed packages.
removing unwanted packages.
rolling back packages to a previously installed version.

Requirements:
pacman

What's New in This Release:
This release adds an improved look-and-feel, color highlighting of packages that are in-date or out-of-date (a la distrowatch), a bugfix to allow use of non-default pacman.conf, performance updates, and additional eye-candy improvements.