Arch Linux

eleanorhawk

Member

Registered: 2019-09-26

Posts: 3

Pacman with MSYS2 packages

I'm doing cross-compilation to Windows using MinGW-w64. On a lark, I thought I'd try syncing with the MSYS2 repo (since it also uses Pacman), and see if I could spare myself building some dependencies. I made an alternate pacman.conf with MSYS2 mirrors, and root, database, cache, and log all pointing to subdirs of ~/.msys2 . To use it I just pass my alt file into --config .

It seems to work pretty well.

These aren't system packages (in fact, they're not even Linux binaries), they're essentially just incidental files for development projects, so I definitely want to keep them in my user directory and chowned to me. So is there a way I can manage these packages without requiring root privilege? It's super uncomfortable and not necessary in this specific case.

To be clear, I am NOT asking to try and circumvent root privilege for system updates. I found a lot of threads like that; this isn't one of them.

Last edited by eleanorhawk (2020-04-19 15:54:41)

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Pacman with MSYS2 packages

You could make a wrapper script which calls pacman with your custom --config file, but invoking pacman via `fakeroot`.

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

eleanorhawk

Member

Registered: 2019-09-26

Posts: 3

Re: Pacman with MSYS2 packages

You could make a wrapper script which calls pacman with your custom --config file, but invoking pacman via `fakeroot`.

Perfect! Thanks!

I'm still relatively new to the Linux scene, so `fakeroot` is news to me.