paclabel is a tiny pacman wrapper. It makes possible to attach custom text "labels" to packages. The labels will be shown while querying the packages using -Q (unless options like -q or -k are passed, of course).

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Installation

Get it from AUR.

Usage

Any valid invocations of pacman are also valid invocations of paclabel (if it isn't like this, it is considered a bug). In fact, the author does alias pacman=paclabel.

paclabel also provides these tiny extensions to the CLI of pacman:

• While installing a package you may specify a space-separated list of labels that will be attached to the package by following the package name with a semicolon. Here is an example:

  paclabel -S pulseaudio:bloat gcc:"compiler The-Holy-C development"

  Label bloat will be attached to pulseaudio. Labels compliler, The-Holy-C and development will be attached to gcc.

• While querying packages the labels will be shown next to package names.

• A new operation -L is provided. The current interface is

  • paclabel -Ll to list all set labels.
  • paclabel -Ld pkg to delete all labels associated with pkg.
  • paclabel -Ls pkg:"labels" to overwrite the previous labels of pkg, if such exist, and attach labels to pkg.

  -l can be combined with -d and -s.

Storage

Labels are stored in /etc/paclabel/labels. Manual editing of the file is perfectly fine.

Caveats

If paclabel encounters a long option, such as --query or --explicit, paclabel gives up and just passes the arguments to pacman. For example,

• paclabel -Qe shows the labels.
• paclabel -Q --explicit and paclabel --query -e don't.

Motivation

The author finds it useful to be able to attach things like installation reason to a package.