What it is
pacman-contrib is a set of small tools that go with pacman, Arch’s package manager. paccache cleans old package files out of pacman’s cache, checkupdates lists available updates without touching your system, pactree shows what a package depends on, and pacdiff helps merge changed configuration files after an update.
pactree -r openssl
Why it’s here
- Disk space. pacman keeps every package it downloads, and paccache trims that.
- Answers about packages. See why something is installed, or what depends on it.
- Config merges. pacdiff finds the
.pacnewfiles updates leave behind.
On CoreDesktop
pacman-contrib is installed from pacman as one of CoreDesktop’s maintenance tools. At the end of each update, paccache keeps the two most recent versions of each installed package in the cache and removes all cached versions of uninstalled ones. If update stops because / is low on space, sudo paccache -rk1 frees more.