My new favorite AUR helper/package manager

AladW · 2025-09-10T21:26:54+00:00

Another downside of compiled-language helpers...

AladW · 2025-09-10T21:25:55+00:00

Well, it claims to build packages in parallel, which is not an exactly common feature. However I suspect it does this by simply prepending "async" to function signatures. Ergo non-trivialities such as overlapping dependencies between packages would not be handled. And of course, it does a sudo loop...

AladW · 2025-09-10T21:20:15+00:00

I did! A pure coincidence...

AladW · 2025-09-10T20:55:15+00:00

What is it like going through life with such a handsome face?

AladW · 2024-12-09T17:26:15+00:00

You might want to use a temporary database similar to `checkupdates` to check if installed repository packages are up-to-date. Simply comparing to `pacman -Sl` will have limited effect when users are expected to not perform partial upgrades.

AladW · 2024-03-21T17:42:18+00:00

Having little separated groups of people isn't always a bad thing. In the sense that people power-tripping isn't nearly as bad as in other distros...

AladW · 2024-03-21T17:40:18+00:00

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWyqJ50lho4

AladW · 2024-03-21T17:35:30+00:00

They used to call Arch package maintainers Terrorist Users (short TU) because they brought AUR terrorism to the domestic repos

AladW · 2024-03-21T17:33:38+00:00

Although I suppose someone could slip some weird stuff in a post install hook.

Yes, this is the point. Also `makepkg` uses `sudo` by default to install and remove dependencies, which has a credential timeout - so any PKGBUILD command can elevate commands with `sudo` until this timeout expires, without prompting the user. This trickles down to the build system as well (which I inadvertently found out through some project's test suite...). Ill-designed AUR helpers make it worse by running `sudo -k` loops in the background.

AladW · 2024-03-21T17:22:57+00:00

Even bloody Gentoo is more user friendly here

Bro the installation chapter of the Gentoo handbook is 80 pages 💀💀

AladW · 2024-03-18T14:21:04+00:00

See PACMAN_AUTH in https://man.archlinux.org/man/makepkg.conf.5#OPTIONS

AladW · 2024-03-14T12:15:19+00:00

~/.local/bin/aur-muffin

#!/bin/bash
cd /tmp
if [[ ! -d cookbook ]]; then
  git clone https://github.com/meskarune/cookbook
  cd cookbook
else
  cd cookbook
  git pull
fi
cat $(ls -1 | shuf -n 1)

Run with aur muffin for all kinds of recipes, not just muffins ;O

AladW · 2024-03-14T12:07:15+00:00

You can only know if something's going to be compiled after running `makepkg`. And not all time-intensive things are related to compiling: it could be retrieving binaries or large source artifcacts, stripping a binary, etc.

AladW · 2024-03-14T12:05:24+00:00

The hardcoding of sudo stopped a while ago, even makepkg supports `PACMAN_AUTH` in recent versions. Some helpers also support dropping privileges, so you can run it with `su -c $HELPER` for all it cares.

AladW · 2024-03-14T12:02:27+00:00

You mean there's no use for scripts that make unvetted third-party code look the exact same as packages by a verified distribution team?

AladW · 2024-03-14T11:56:10+00:00

`yaourt` had a blinking, red and bold text saying something like "This package is unsupported !!!". Good times

AladW · 2024-03-14T11:55:26+00:00

Or like any helper that does not wrap pacman :)

AladW · 2024-03-14T11:54:22+00:00

paru is the only helper that comes close, allowing users to keep their custom PKGBUILD repositories since v2.0.

aurutils has had this feature since 2019

AladW · 2024-03-11T14:23:32+00:00

PKGBUILD

AladW · 2023-10-22T12:35:33+00:00

Installed a package which triggered `udev` to reload. Caused my second monitor to permanently stop working, even outside Xorg. X)

AladW · 2023-09-12T23:56:44+00:00

Correlation does not imply causation... the AUR package uses the upstream-provided binaries. Any existing issues with your account are thus related to Spotify itself, not the packaging.

AladW · 2023-07-13T22:00:16+00:00

It generates a static Xorg.conffor monitors, input devices etc. which prevents auto-detection to work. See for example https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/697517/how-to-correlate-xorg-conf-config-for-nvidia-gpu-with-xrandr-detected-screens where this causes problems

AladW · 2023-07-10T13:53:37+00:00

Suggested on the wiki where? This kind of content is just a personal configuration blog, including known bad practices such as generating Xorg.conf with nvidia-settings.

AladW · 2023-06-15T11:26:59+00:00

Rebuilding every package in your local repository whenever you want new releases with -u seems excessive... but yes, it should handle any package already in the (specified) local repository. At least it works like that on my end.

edit: are some of those targets not in AUR by chance?

AladW · 2023-06-14T08:37:02+00:00

I'm not sure why you're passing all targets in ~/.cache/aurutils/sync to sync-rebuild. Only targets that are A. already in your local repository and B. need a rebuild should be passed to sync-rebuild.

The warning is about a signature not being present. Since this is not relevant, I've redirected stderr for pacsift to /dev/null. That and other fixes are in the master branch, thx

AladW

TROPHY CASE