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patlefort

Member

Registered: 2021-01-30

Posts: 15

pat-aur: Highly configurable aur helper. Build in clean containers.

GitLab: https://gitlab.com/patlefort/pat-aur
AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/pat-aur-git

pat-aur is a new AUR helper that aims at building packages in clean containers. Current popular aur helpers don't do that by default, my goal is rectify this by making it mandatory.

The core features are:

• Correctness: Build in clean containers always.

• Configurable: Configure builds by host, target and package.

• Parallelization: Build multiple packages in parallel. Parallel download of sources and dependencies.

• Cross-compilation: Build packages for other architectures. (with caveats and limitations at the moment)

pat-aur is not a pacman wrapper. It does not aim at replacing pacman. There are a few things to know at the moment:

• ninja: I created a package named ninja-jobserver, which is ninja with job server client and server support. It needs to be installed on the host and mapped in target config for better parallelization across builds. Read the readme. Hopefully it will be merged into ninja soon.

• elvish-git need to be used. The next stable version should be fine.

• bubblewrap: pat-aur need bubblewrap with overlayfs support, you will have to use bubblewrap-overlayfs for the moment.

• Providers needs to be mapped manually in target config. This is a design decision that make developing pat-aur much simpler and I also think it's better overall to know exactly what is going to be used by configuring it manually.

• Containers are unprivileged, meaning they do not require root access. I haven't run into any issues so far but it's not impossible.

By default with a little bit of configuration, it should work fine for the typical use case of simply building and installing packages for your own x86_64 machine. For more advanced use cases, read the readme, the manual and the example config files. In any cases, read the setup section of the readme for a quick setup.

I think it is developed enough to be used by other people at this stage and I could use testers and some feedback.

Last edited by patlefort (2024-05-31 21:44:22)

Alad

Wiki Admin/IRC Op

From: Bagelstan

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 2,418

Website

Re: pat-aur: Highly configurable aur helper. Build in clean containers.

This looks really cool, especially the approaches for unprivileged building and parallelization. When I got some more time I'll definitely give it a try

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