Source Caches

A "source cache" in Pacman is basically a URL or location in your file system containing Pacman source code (files ending in ".pacman"). A typical example is the BU cache. If you do 

% pacman -registry
You will see that the symbolic name BU is mapped to a URL and you'll see information about who manages this cache. If you open this URL in your web browser, you'll see that it's just a directory tree containing Pacman source code files.

The main difference in source caches in Pacman 3 are:

  1. You can access source caches via SSH and Globus as well as via http.
  2. The symbolic cache names like BU can be defined in the language.
  3. Different versions of a package may appear in the same cache with different file names.
As before, the manager of a cache may use subdirectories. A typical good use of subdirectories is to put typically installed top level packages at the top and put dependent packages in subdirectories.

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