Arch Linux

Ekzel

Member

Registered: 2018-09-17

Posts: 4

Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

I'm confused about one thing.  If you want to install a package from AUR, can you use any AUR helper, or do certain AUR helpers only work with certain packages?  I'm looking to try out the exa package which is in AUR, and the page I was looking at gives instructions for installing exa with yaourt, but I can't find anything on yaourt on the Arch Wiki and I read another page that says yaourt is no longer being developed, so chances are I'll have to use something else.

2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,648

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

If you are just starting with the AUR, I'd recommend not using a helper at all.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ar … Repository

Moving to Newbie Corner.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,101

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

exa is in community.

Ekzel

Member

Registered: 2018-09-17

Posts: 4

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

exa is in community.

Oh, okay.  Must have gotten moved to the mainstream repos after the article I read was written.

Last edited by Ekzel (2019-05-08 23:55:23)

2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,648

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

Oh, okay.  Must have gotten moved to the mainstream repos after the article I read was written.

This is why we don't recommend or support third-party guides (youtube, blogs, etc). They are almost always wrong and/or outdated. Read the wiki.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,530

Website

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

FWIW, I believe exa was only very recently moved into [community], prior to that it was in the AUR.  Some relatively up-to-date docs might still refer to it being in the AUR.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

esuhl

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2009-09-16

Posts: 140

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

For future reference:

I'm confused about one thing.  If you want to install a package from AUR, can you use any AUR helper, or do certain AUR helpers only work with certain packages?

All AUR helpers aim to accomplish the same task.  Whichever one you choose, it should be able to install any package from AUR.

I'm looking to try out the exa package which is in AUR, and the page I was looking at gives instructions for installing exa with yaourt, but I can't find anything on yaourt on the Arch Wiki and I read another page that says yaourt is no longer being developed, so chances are I'll have to use something else.

Yes -- yaourt shouldn't be used any more.  The better alternatives to look at are probably aurman or yay.

Alad

Wiki Admin/IRC Op

From: Bagelstan

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 2,421

Website

Re: Help me understand how AUR helpers work.

Yes -- yaourt shouldn't be used any more.  The better alternatives to look at are probably aurman or yay.

Besides that these "alternatives" address nothing of the problem at hand - being a beginning user who used third-party abstractions before understanding the basic, supported mechanisms - they obscure the differences between official repositories and the AUR even more than yaourt does. In particular, yaourt gives a big warning every time you want to install an AUR package, while its clones put in no effort whatsoever to distinguish the AUR from the official repositories.

In other words, read the wiki and get familiar with makepkg and git. Unless you use an absurd amount of AUR packages, those and email notifications should suffice most of the time.

Last edited by Alad (2019-05-09 18:33:58)

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Mods are just community members who have the occasionally necessary option to move threads around and edit posts. -- Trilby