Manjaro pamac¶

ID: pamac
Home page: https://github.com/manjaro/pamac-cli
Version requirement: >= 11
Platforms: 🐧 Linux (except Windows Subsystem for Linux v1, Windows Subsystem for Linux v2)
Operations: installed · outdated · orphans · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · cleanup
purl types: pkg:alpm · pkg:pamac
CLI name: pamac
Issues and PRs: 📦 manager: pacman-based
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/pamac.toml

pamac is Manjaro’s package manager (https://github.com/manjaro/pamac-cli).

The project is split across three repositories: the pamac binary mpm drives ships from manjaro/pamac-cli, the GTK front-end from manjaro/pamac and the libalpm backend from manjaro/libpamac. The GitLab home this manager was queued under is archived and redirects to GitHub.

Escalation is polkit’s, so no operation is marked sudo: run as a normal user pamac spawns pkttyagent and authenticates the transaction over D-Bus against the org.manjaro.pamac.commit policy. Manjaro’s own wiki is explicit that sudo pamac is wrong (“Do not use sudo with pamac”), and wrapping it would stack escalation on top of the broker. --no-confirm suppresses pamac’s own “Apply transaction ?” prompt but never the polkit check, so an unattended run depends on the host’s polkit policy, exactly as it does for pkcon.

No color to suppress and no color flag to pass: src/cli.vala and src/transaction-cli.vala contain no ANSI escape, no isatty branch and no color option at all. Only search is terminal-width sensitive, and its get_term_width() falls back to 80 columns when the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl fails, which is what happens under the pipe mpm reads through.

No sync: pamac ships no read-only metadata refresh. Its whole subcommand set is search, info, list, clone, build, install, reinstall, remove, checkupdates, upgrade/update and clean. Refreshing happens either as a side effect of upgrade --force-refresh, which is a full system upgrade, or into throwaway temporary databases inside checkupdates. Declaring one would mean faking it with a mutating command.

Everything here is scoped to the official repositories: --no-aur is passed explicitly wherever pamac accepts it, rather than inheriting the host’s /etc/pamac.conf, whose EnableAUR is on by default on Manjaro. That keeps results identical on every host and keeps outdated off the AUR RPC. The blind spot is the same one pacman documents: list --installed still lists foreign packages (an AUR package simply has an empty repository column), so an AUR package appears as installed yet never as outdated. Reach the AUR through the helpers mpm wraps for it (yay, paru, pikaur, trizen, pacaur).

What `mpm` adds to `pamac`¶

Through mpm, pamac gains --exact and --extended search, to narrow to exact names or match descriptions.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover pamac alongside pacaur, pacman, paru, yay and any other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your `pamac` commands, in `mpm`¶

You already know pamac: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…	With `pamac`	With `mpm`
List what’s installed	`pamac list --installed`	`mpm --pamac installed`
List outdated packages	`pamac checkupdates --quiet --no-aur`	`mpm --pamac outdated`
Search for a package	`pamac search --no-aur <query>`	`mpm --pamac search <query>`
Install a package	`pamac install --no-confirm <package_id>`	`mpm install pkg:pamac/<package_id>`
Upgrade one package	`pamac install --no-confirm --no-upgrade <package_id>`	`mpm --pamac upgrade <package_id>`
Upgrade everything	`pamac upgrade --no-confirm --no-aur`	`mpm --pamac upgrade --all`
Remove a package	`pamac remove --no-confirm <package_id>`	`mpm remove pkg:pamac/<package_id>`
List orphaned dependencies	`pamac list --orphans`	`mpm --pamac orphans`
Clear caches	`pamac clean --no-confirm`	`mpm --pamac cleanup --cache`

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations¶

Operation	Supported	Notes
`installed`	✓
`outdated`	✓
`orphans`	✓
`search`	✓	exact and extended search backfilled by `mpm`
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`
`cleanup`	✓	`--orphans` runs the system-wide orphan sweep
`doctor`

Selecting and configuring `pamac`¶

Deselect pamac for a single run with --no-pamac, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
pamac = false

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.pamac]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template pamac prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes¶

A few jobs you would otherwise script around pamac, one mpm command each:

Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --pamac dump pamac.toml, then mpm restore pamac.toml on the next one.
Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --pamac sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation¶

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

None of its operations needs root.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of Manjaro pamac’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

Registry: Distro binary archives (pkg:deb, pkg:rpm, pkg:alpm, pkg:apk)
Retraction: Index revert: removal is an archive operation and the mirror is rebuilt without the package. Debian, for one, requires filing an RM: bug against ftp.debian.org (developers-reference)
Publish date: ❌ the version string is the distro maintainer’s build, carrying no upstream publication date

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe¶

The version is probed by running:

$ pamac --version
pamac-cli 11.7.4  -  libpamac 11.7.4

and extracted with:

r"^\S+\s+(?P<version>\d+\.\d+\.\d+)"

Reference traces¶

Raw native outputs captured in the bundled definition: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Manjaro pamac well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ pamac list --installed
plymouth 26.134.222-1  extra  1.2 MB
ventoy   1.1.12-1      extra  16.8 MB

$ pamac checkupdates --quiet --no-aur
plymouth  26.134.222-1 -> 26.134.222-2
ventoy  1.1.12-1 -> 1.1.14-1

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --pamac installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog¶

7.7.0.dev0 (unreleased)
- Add Manjaro’s pamac package manager with installed, outdated, orphans, search, install, upgrade, remove and cleanup support, shipped as a bundled definition. Operations are scoped to the official repositories, and escalation is left to polkit. Single-package upgrades route through install --no-upgrade, since pamac upgrade ignores its package arguments and upgrades the whole system.