Why do you Syyu instead of just Syu all the time? If you feel the need to do so, then I suspect you are using a bad mirror. While it may sound like splitting peanuts, you are wasting bandwidth.
This may be true if you are -Syy'uing in very short intervals, say multiple times a day. Because, the arch repos update so frequently, the whole databases are downloaded anyway. Core is the most silent, which is understandable considering the type and number of packages it contains.
If only the repos supported deltas ...
]]>I also don't care about the small amount of bandwidth I waste.
I suspect the concern was more about the servers-end. I don't know how much of an impact it'd really have, but syncing from the mirror needlessly does use *their* bandwidth too.
]]>Why do you Syyu instead of just Syu all the time? If you feel the need to do so, then I suspect you are using a bad mirror. While it may sound like splitting peanuts, you are wasting bandwidth.
I don't always update my system as often as I would like to. If I stay on top of it, I just -Syu. I also don't care about the small amount of bandwidth I waste.
]]>pacman -Syyu
yaourt -Sua
I only use yaourt to update the packages I have installed with yaourt. I know I could update my system with it since it will just call pacman, but I like to call pacman myself. No one tells pacman what to do but me.
]]>Give someone a reel, and they may learn to use it.
Nice.
]]>I (mostly) agree, Awebb, but yaourt - in it's simplicity - becomes a tool for giving people fish rather than teaching them to fish. And this is the problem.
This is, err, exactly what I am saying. Your "but" confuses me. Never say this to a woman, by the way.
]]>Automating repetitive tasks is handy. To possibly over-extend the metaphor, once someone knows how to fish, a good reel can come in quite handy: it's much better than dealing with all that fishing line by hand. Give someone a reel, and they may learn to use it. Many aur-helpers are good fishing reels; yaourt is a coupon for a McFish sandwich.
]]>1. New users tend to install yaourt from a custom repository, so they never learn, how to use the AUR. Some packages require a little manual intervention that cannot be solved by yaourt automatically. Some setups have disk size problems with the default folders for makepkg and yaourt, so building sometimes fails. While this is not an actual problem with the software, those people then show up on the forums, posting the yaourt output, being absolutely helpless. The default answer is a batch of links to the wiki articles of the AUR and makepkg. This is why I said, that new users should avoid such tools, until they know, what is going on.
2. Yaourt has also a history of not keeping up with pacman updates. While this happens, say, only three times a year, relying on yaourt for all package maintenance kicks the user out of his usual routine three times a year. While this is surely not the end of the world, it is again a reason for a lot of users to create new threads here, instead of reading the comments on the AUR page of yaourt or maybe the forum thread found on the page behind the source link. Knowledge about the AUR would lead to looking at the AUR page, klick the link, see if there are news, bugs or comments.
On my first round with Arch, I also installed yaourt from the external repository, half the packages I wanted did not build, so I thought "wow, this AUR things sounds cool, but it is broken" and actually went on trying another distro.
]]>Thank you so much people for taking the time and experience and suggesting.
After a few more days of using arch I believe the best thing for me is searching AUR using yaourt and manually downloading the PKG file and using makepkg to build it, then, using pacman -U to install the tar, I believe this is also giving me as a user more control over the process and let me take my time editing and viewing the PKG and *.install files.
Uninstall yaourt then. It's overkill for what you will be using. cower is perfect for that: "cower -s" to search the AUR and "cower -d" to download and extract the tarball; then you just do everything else the old-fashioned way.
]]>After a few more days of using arch I believe the best thing for me is searching AUR using yaourt and manually downloading the PKG file and using makepkg to build it, then, using pacman -U to install the tar, I believe this is also giving me as a user more control over the process and let me take my time editing and viewing the PKG and *.install files.
]]>As for AUR Helpers, I am in complete agreement with bohoomil. I find `cower`/`abs` + `makepkg` are all that are needed for custom packages.
All the best,
-HG
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