Arch Linux

Envek

Member

Registered: 2021-11-03

Posts: 2

What to do with AUR if upstream published .zst packages for pacman?

Hi! I recently adopted yarxi package, after Yarxi developers released a new version for Linux, including pre-built package for Arch Linux (see this page in Russian, near to the bottom: http://yarxi.ru/mac_linux.html, release announce was in social networks, e.g. in their group on Facebook).

However, in AUR submission guidelines there is following sentence exists:

The AUR should not contain the binary tarball created by makepkg, nor should it contain the filelist.

So, I'm a bit lost what should I do to provide users an easy way to install this package (well, downloading package and using pacman -U isn't user friendly, I believe, while AUR allows to find and install package easily).

Should I change package building from existing converting from deb packages to converting from zst package or should I somehow propose it to inclusion into main packages? However, there is no source code published, as far as I know.

AUR package also has some other issues (like pkgbase=pkbase) which I also don't know how to resolve.

Alad

Wiki Admin/IRC Op

From: Bagelstan

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 2,414

Website

Re: What to do with AUR if upstream published .zst packages for pacman?

well, downloading package and using pacman -U isn't user friendly

No, having users install the actual package with pacman is the correct approach. If you want "user friendly", ask upstream to provide an unofficial user repository.

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

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,607

Website

Re: What to do with AUR if upstream published .zst packages for pacman?

Should I change package building from existing converting from deb packages to converting from zst package ... there is no source code published, as far as I know.

Given that the source code is not available then installing the upstream arch package is definitely the best (available) option.

If source code was available, building from source with a PKGBUILD would still be preferable to using the upstream prepackaged pkg.tar.xz because the upstream precompiled binary could be linked to older libs, or there could be issues of whether users trust a precompiled binary.  However, both of these issues also exist with converting a .deb to pacman package, but that conversion process adds some more oddities.

Theoretically you could convert from the upstream pkg.tar.xz to a re-assembled package via a PKGBUILD - but this would be pretty silly.  The only possible purpose I could imagine for this would be if upstream's package installed files to incorrect locations, but even then the best solution would be to request they fix their package.

Side note: there is no need to download then install with `pacman -U` ... pacman can download just fine:

pacman -U http://yarxi.ru/yarxi-1.15-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

Envek

Member

Registered: 2021-11-03

Posts: 2

Re: What to do with AUR if upstream published .zst packages for pacman?

But pacman -U requires signature to be present in case if file is located on a remote host:

$ sudo pacman -U http://yarxi.ru/yarxi-1.15-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
loading packages...
error: '/var/cache/pacman/pkg/yarxi-1.15-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst': package missing required signature

But yeah, from your messages it really seems that it is better to request removal of the package from AUR. Is it correct?

Thanks for suggestions btw