packages in AUR

erm67 · 2007-08-01 20:47:01

I just completed the switch to arch of my personal desktop (great, my new favourite distro BTW), and since I installed a few packages from AUR I was wondering what happens when the PKGBUILD there are updated? I mean how can I know (possibly automatically like pacman -Syu does) that there is a more recent version of pkg X in AUR without checking it regularly?

Snowman · 2007-08-01 20:56:24

you can use aurbuild (PKGBUILD in AUR):
# aurbuild -su

yaourt is another AUR helper tool that probably have that functionallity too.

Cerebral · 2007-08-01 20:56:51

I'd suggest you check out the aurbuild tool, available in the aur.

erm67 · 2007-08-01 21:17:21

Yes that is exactly what I was looking for ....

Lone_Wolf · 2007-08-01 21:23:25

The notify feature for aur is also useful to stay uptodate (you have to be logged in to use it).
Every time a comment is added to the packages you have notify set for, you'll get an email.

dolby · 2007-08-01 21:39:13

i would also like to add that imho its best to first se how AUR and buildning packages from pkgbuilds work and then use the automated tools suggested earlier.
especially if youre not familiar with building packages from source.
after all noone guarantees (unless the packages have been flagged as safe to use by a Truested User) that they are not going to harm your system in some way

erm67 · 2007-08-01 21:46:37

Another question: it is possible to mark and unmark an installed package as "Explicitly installed" like in debian?

ezzetabi · 2007-08-02 06:57:54

No, already discussed. :S
But as far as I understood it will be done.

aurbuild is a wonderful tool, why not moving it to an official repo? Or even add it in the same group (base I think) of pacman?

Last edited by ezzetabi (2007-08-02 07:02:34)

erm67 · 2007-08-02 07:15:46

ezzetabi wrote:

No, already discussed. :S
But as far as I understood it will be done.

Since mine was a fresh install I wanted to take some risks so I modified the orphan perl script from this forum to search all installed packages that where required by another pkg and append "%REASON%\n1" to the end of their desc file in /var/lib/pacman/local/*. It worked, now all packages actually required by some other pkg are marked as installed as dependencies, if I understood well the meaning of %REASON%\n1. I personally dislike the use of non self-descriptive parameter, but as long as the format is documented, I had preferred something like "%REASON%\nManually", "%REASON%\nAuto".
It shouldn't be difficult to add it as an option to pacman or other package manager.
I am leaving for a short holiday today, when I am back maybe I will polish the script and post it.

shining · 2007-08-02 13:22:10

erm67 wrote:

ezzetabi wrote:
No, already discussed. :S
But as far as I understood it will be done.
Since mine was a fresh install I wanted to take some risks so I modified the orphan perl script from this forum to search all installed packages that where required by another pkg and append "%REASON%\n1" to the end of their desc file in /var/lib/pacman/local/*. It worked, now all packages actually required by some other pkg are marked as installed as dependencies, if I understood well the meaning of %REASON%\n1. I personally dislike the use of non self-descriptive parameter, but as long as the format is documented, I had preferred something like "%REASON%\nManually", "%REASON%\nAuto".
It shouldn't be difficult to add it as an option to pacman or other package manager.
I am leaving for a short holiday today, when I am back maybe I will polish the script and post it.

1) Why would you do such a thing ?
one example :
I install mplayer : pacman -S mplayer (because I'm using mplayer on its own), now mplayer is marked as explictly installed
Later I install acidrip which depends on mplayer : pacman -S acidrip
mplayer is still marked as explicitly installed, because it was, even though it's now required by acidrip.
mplayer isn't only useful as a dependency of acidrip, it's also useful on its own.

2) The %REASON% field isn't a parameter, it's something totally specific to the current text database used by pacman.
No user has to know how pacman works internally, just like every other programs. And the database format could be totally changed anyway.
In any cases, it doesn't have to be self descriptive, your suggestion would increase the size of the database for no reason.
It doesn't have to be documented, because the database isn't supposed to be edited directly by the user, only by pacman.

It just happens that a database in text format can be easily edited by someone who knows what he's doing, but that's all.

Edit : What is much more useful imo is the following :
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7193
which has been fixed.

Last edited by shining (2007-08-02 13:33:24)

erm67 · 2007-08-02 14:04:35

shining wrote:

1) Why would you do such a thing ?
one example :
I install mplayer : pacman -S mplayer (because I'm using mplayer on its own), now mplayer is marked as explictly installed
Later I install acidrip which depends on mplayer : pacman -S acidrip
mplayer is still marked as explicitly installed, because it was, even though it's now required by acidrip.
mplayer isn't only useful as a dependency of acidrip, it's also useful on its own.

Yes this is a problem indeed, and I am not sure this could be useful to others, but my first arch installation was a bit adventurous.
Let me explain ....
Well I had only 1 cd left, burned the arch install iso but for some obscure reason it could not boot, so I booted from the boot cd of another distro, formatted the partition, extracted using tar filesystem,coreutils,glibc,zlib,readline,ncurses,pacman,bash,acl,attr packages in it and started bash in a chroot, at this point I had a working bare arch system, but no clue about how to continue the installation so I used a brute force approach:
for i in /mnt/cdrom/../pkg/*; do pacman -U $i; done
I repeated this loop a few times until all dependencies were satisfied and all packages in the cd installed. Not best method to install it I admit, but it worked (and now I appreciate arch for its simplicity), the only drawback was that all packages were marked as manually because installed this way.
So I had to solve the problem using a script, since I wrote it it I thought to post it, could be useful to someone, maybe with the possibility to choose which package to mark as dependency showing if it is required or not.
Anyway, to the beaches now .........

Last edited by erm67 (2007-08-30 12:46:43)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-08-01 20:47:01

packages in AUR

#2 2007-08-01 20:56:24

Re: packages in AUR

#3 2007-08-01 20:56:51

Re: packages in AUR

#4 2007-08-01 21:17:21

Re: packages in AUR

#5 2007-08-01 21:23:25

Re: packages in AUR

#6 2007-08-01 21:39:13

Re: packages in AUR

#7 2007-08-01 21:46:37

Re: packages in AUR

#8 2007-08-02 06:57:54

Re: packages in AUR

#9 2007-08-02 07:15:46

Re: packages in AUR

#10 2007-08-02 13:22:10

Re: packages in AUR

#11 2007-08-02 14:04:35

Re: packages in AUR

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