Arch Linux

egor_tensin

Member

Registered: 2025-07-21

Posts: 6

PKGBUILD for a ready-made package?

Hello, I know a company that provides a ready-made Arch package (as in, it's already been built by them, it's a proper .pkg.tar.zst with .MTREE, .INSTALL, .PKGINFO, etc.). Problem is, they only upload it to their website, and only the latest version, so upgrades are manual, which is problematic. I'd like to create an AUR package with proper versioning to mitigate this (I'm planning to parse the version from .PKGINFO). Unfortunately, I'm having trouble with coming up with a way to simply re-use a prebuilt package. Can you please help me with that? Thanks.

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,988

Re: PKGBUILD for a ready-made package?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … repository

Otherwise you'd do what the -deb and -bin packages do: extract the package and re-package it.
It's like any odd tarball.

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,525

Website

Re: PKGBUILD for a ready-made package?

... upgrades are manual, which is problematic. I'd like to create an AUR package with proper versioning to mitigate this

What exactly would this mitigate?  All AUR upgrades are manual.

Just periodically run `pacman -U <upstream-url>` (assuming you trust the upstream source).

Last edited by Trilby (2026-09-11 11:41:46)

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cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,346

Re: PKGBUILD for a ready-made package?

All AUR upgrades are manual.

unless you use an aur-helper like yay or paru - which OP likely refers to: some easy way to have a PKGBUILD magicly check whether the dev/distributor has published a new version

@OP
you still would have to maintain you aur package and update it everytime the vendor uploads a new version - there's no magic way to just create some PKGBUILD once, upload it to the AUR, use an aur-helper like yay or paru and expect it to magicly detect "oh, the vendor has released a new version - let's grep that"

to me this sounds like an XY problem - request the vendor to publish on aur themself - if they don't there's likely a reason for it