Arch Linux

tropicalia

Member

Registered: 2025-11-13

Posts: 10

Reliability of Third-Party Installation/Maintenance Tool: "Rebos"

I am a new Linux user and would like to consult the community on a specific third-party tool.

I would like to gather experience and insight regarding the reliability and adherence to Arch best practices when using a tool called Rebos. Specifically, I am trying to determine if this tool should be avoided, as it might introduce friction and lead to more frequent package breakage.

Here are the relevant links for reference:

    Gitlab - jullanggit/rebos

    Gitlab Wiki - Oglo12/rebos

    YouTube Video

    Reliability Concerns: Are there known issues or instances where Rebos has led to package breakage, dependency conflicts, or other long-term system instability?

    Best Practices: Should users solely follow supported methods for package/applications management, such as using pacman and makepkg directly (and perhaps a trusted wrapper like paru for the AUR) to ensure maximum system integrity and stability, and entirely avoid third-party automation tools like Rebos?

Any experience reports or technical analysis of this particular tool would be greatly appreciated. I invested quite a lot of effort to create a declaritive config for this tool but just realized that since Arch philosophy is about using commands that this method of maintaining packages in a rolling release could just be too fragile and make it break more often.

In case someone is interested in my config I can post in a subsequent response.

Last edited by tropicalia (2025-11-13 19:43:03)

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,565

Re: Reliability of Third-Party Installation/Maintenance Tool: "Rebos"

Installation
You can install Rebos from crates.io:

cargo install rebos
If you are on Arch Linux, you can get it from the oglo-arch-repo.

The only package related to this in aur is https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rebos-git which is orphaned and doesn't comply with Rust_package_guidelines

How To Use

  Add this to `/etc/pacman.conf`:

[oglo-arch-repo]
SigLevel = Optional DatabaseOptional
Server = https://gitlab.com/Oglo12/$repo/-/raw/main/$arch

  Run this command:

sudo pacman -Syy

The double -yy is not needed in this case, also it needs to be pacman -Syu to prevent future issues.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unoffi … positories doesn't list this repo.

This thread is the only one on this forum were rebos or oglo are mentioned.

Combining those things I can draw one conclusion : using rebos is NOT supported on this forum.

That doesn't mean its unreliable though.
Please elaborate on what you want to achieve by using this tool.

Moderator Note
moving to System Administration

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

tropicalia

Member

Registered: 2025-11-13

Posts: 10

Re: Reliability of Third-Party Installation/Maintenance Tool: "Rebos"

Please elaborate on what you want to achieve by using this tool.

Reproducibility in any new Linux installations and migrations (like migration from Arch to Gentoo). I already have in my installation plan etckeeper and chezmoi, maybe they provide enough coverage for what I need. I was also considering to add mkosi as well which is documented in the Arch Wiki.

Honest, I was already on the fence and I feel that your response provided me guidance enough to don't go down the path to explore Rebos. Don't get me wrong I appreciate your input, I was looking for some outside confirmation to validate that it would be probably a bit too risky.

Thank you for taking the time to get back to me.

Offtopic, I noticed that you moved this to System Administration and it was where I was initially planning to post. I'm new around here and was uncertain where to post it. This sentence kind of throw me off "As a rule of thumb, if you don't need root access for the issue, it doesn't belong here.".

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,565

Re: Reliability of Third-Party Installation/Maintenance Tool: "Rebos"

from the description of rebos : 

Is there an elegant way to install all packages,
enable all services, add all groups to the user, etc..?

That clearly requires root access.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky