> Pacman is especially confusing since -S actually means the sync mode. Which doesn't really fit with the idea of installing a package. The idea is that you ar

> Pacman is especially confusing since -S actually means the sync mode. Which doesn't really fit with the idea of installing a package. The idea is that you are synchronizing your copy of the local package (which is currently empty/nonexistant) with the remote copy. It's also the same command you use to update that package. So, pacman -S foo will upgrade foo if it exists locally, and find and install the most recent version of foo if it does not. Once you get used to it, the command-line switches in pacman actually address your second concern (the one with apt/yum). In pacman, everything is built on top of a very simple database model - it just so happens that that simple database model is also powerful enough to serve a range of complex functions.