Because the AUR is a pretty low quality repo. Not sure if anything has changed since 2 years ago, but last I used arch, the AUR was full of broken, abandoned, and unbuildable packages. The Debian repos, fedora+rpmfusion, etc, provide a comparable number of software packages with substantially higher quality, hence no need for the AUR. Fedora actually has COPRs which suffer from the same quality issues as the AUR for similar reasons.
Thing is, the AUR isn’t really meant to be your primary repo. You can really get anything into the AUR.
The reason why I love it so much is because if I need a package that’s not in the main arch repo (which tbh isn’t many), then I don’t need to bother going to some github page and compiling from source, I can just find it in the AUR and it’s all done for me. I did this with things like goverlay and it’s one thing that I immediately miss when I distro hop away from something arch-based.
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It’s so kino. Incredibly hard to learn and much more to master, but much more powerful. Nothing beats easily modifying a derivation’s source, or adding patches or build options or whatever you want.
Same as any ports system. Though yes, for Linux the alternatives may seem less convenient like Portage or less extensive like Pkgsrc.
I only use Gentoo for a small bit, so I can’t comment on it, and I haven’t used the other thing ever. I wish linux a culture similar to the bsds when it came to ports stuff. /usr/local is barely used if ever.
What makes you think there aren’t equivalents out there?
Gentoo’s Guru repository, for one, and any of the multitude of ebuild repositories available through the
eselect repositorycommand.The AUR is not particularly special.
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And the AUR is not as extensive as the Nix Store.
That sounds suspiciously like some shifting goalposts.
What’s so special about it? Isn’t it just a repository? Or am I missing something? If it’s just a repo, Ubuntu has PPAs and everyone and their mother is creating PPAs.
It’s a single, central, community space for build plans, which are extremely easy for anyone to create and submit.
Edit: And easier to audit than prebuilt packages
PPAs and the AUR are very different. Where as PPAs contain prebuilt .deb packages, the AUR hosts PkgBuild scripts that typically pull from a git repo and compile a program for you.
I understand the confusion though, because they accomplish the same goal of installing software that is not in the main repos, but in different ways.
For my needs I found that that flatpak just werks for anything not on the distros repos. And for the really obscure stuff I’ve used, I could just build from source
Having to build from source is exactly why I don’t think the AUR has a replacement. There are many similar package managers but non as extensive. Like NUR for NixOS.
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@InternetPirate I mean apt based distros do have ppa’s although I have found aur to have better support. theoretically though they are equivalent i believe?
I use Arch because pacman sounds cooler than apt, wakka wakka.
It really just comes down to the differences in goals and philosophies between each distribution. Some distros have large curated repositories containing most of everything a normal user would want to use. That’s what people expect from those distros, and people use them because they want that experience. Likewise, people don’t use arch just because it has the AUR. They want a more DIY experience, and arch provides that, with the AUR being an essential part of how it works.
You’re not going to get arch users to switch to ubuntu or whatever by duct-taping an AUR clone onto it. Furthermore, I believe trying to make one distro “to rule them all” that attempts to appeal to every niche would be not only a train wreck technically, but an abomination, antithetical to the principles of the OSS community as well.
Many distros have independent community generated package repositories though most aren’t on official infrastructure. Ubuntu has PPA which is close. I try and avoid AUR as much as I can. It is a potential attack surface and packages are sometimes poorly maintained and break. I like it for system stuff and I mostly review the PKGBUILD. It seems like a good way for software to find a path into the official repos. There was a lot of resistance from me initially but for most desktop applications flatpak has proven to be a better solution.
The equivalent for Gentoo is the overlay system. gpo.zugaina.org (which is the best total package index) claims to list over 100000 ebuilds for 56000 different packages (some packages have multiple versions in-tree), and I know their database is not complete, since I contribute occasionally to an overlay that they don’t index. Oh, and that also doesn’t include things like perl library packages autogenerated by g-cpan.
So, um, yeah, useful but not unique.
AUR is definitely not the reason people choose arch haha
Fellow Linux folks, this direction is one of the main problems and you know it very darn well.
AUR is definitely not the reason people choose arch haha
I made this post to prove it:
Your sample rate is 55 people on lemmy. DistroWatch has more than tripple the amount of arch users hitting the page per day. There are about 5500 registered accounts on the official arch forum.
Nah, it is my MAIN reason using Arch-based distro. If not because AUR, I should still using rock-solid Linux Mint… lol… 😅
Same here. If Pacstall was as extensive as AUR I would still use Linux Mint.
AUR is really not that great? Who moves to Arch for it? It’s been my main OS for I don’t even know how long but AUR has been my primary pain point. PKGBUILD is cool and useful useful. AUR however, is untrusted (or rather shouldn’t be trusted), often out of date, sometimes requires compilation, and doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
Am I missing something?
doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
paruis coolAnd the older
yayI have an hard time moving out of yay… TBH if AUR could be installable from pacman it would be awesome
It is technically possible to install paru through Cargo which you can get just from pacman by installing rust and you can install pikaur through PIP. Both can mess with your systems packages though so I do not recommend it.
Oh thank you for the tip, I forgot paru was written in rust and of course rustup is on ally machines (btw?) ;)
Yeah, AUR isn’t great because it’s engineered as a second class citizen given the necessity of third-party tools like
yaourt, and that the whole process of installation can’t be done directly through the first-party tool (pacman), such that updating the main packages can trivially cause third-party packages to suddenly stop working. ArchLinux offers just one way - their way - when it comes to dealing with software versions and if the user happens to depend on some thing they want to keep around, tough luck, and hope that future upgrades don’t force a breakage that requires a recompilation which may no longer work.That runs completely opposite to Gentoo, where the first-party repositories are defined the exact same way as third-party repositories, and that updates to first-party libraries generally don’t immediately break existing binaries because the distribution was built with recompilation requirements from upgrade breakages in mind. Since third-party packages are treated no differently (no second class citizen treatment), their first-party tool (
emerge) can manage the complete lifecycle of “third-party” packages in the exact same manner (as opposed to needing any third party tools to manage the build). This alone reduces the mental bandwidth for the end-users that are managing their set of required packages for their systems. All this flexibility is ultimately part of the various reasons that got me to switch from Arch back to Gentoo.AUR however, is untrusted (or rather shouldn’t be trusted), often out of date
So basically like a PPA which are used by many users of Ubuntu. The only difference is that the PKBUILD files used to build the packages are easier to check than the final packages in a PPA. And that’s exactly what is a big advantage for me.
sometimes requires compilation,
This is often because a project does not offer ready-made packages that can be downloaded from Github, for example. There are also people who do not trust ready-made packages from unknown third parties. I wouldn’t necessarily download and execute a binary file from a Dropbox of a user I don’t know. Compiling is the safer way if the source code is downloaded from a more trustworthy source.
and doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
Personally, I don’t think aurutils, paru and yay are bad. I currently use aurutils myself. But as far as AUR helpers are concerned, everyone has their own preferences. That’s why there are so many ;-)
What does the AUR get you that a:
../configure --prefix=(pwd)/install make make installdoesn’t?Installing dependencies automatically mostly
It gives you a lot of convenience, auto updates, and dependencies. While it is nice being up to date by checking the git and making it by yourself it is much more convenient to have a package manager for it when you have many Make packages
The majority of other distros value package managers that allow for complex graph evaluation of dependencies, and the ability to roll back. This is granted with rpm and Deb, but not for pkgsource, which is a pretty lightweight format compared to those.
As for AUR, the major distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) support 3p repositories as well. The main concern is security. IIRC one of major complaints for AUR in the past was that it didn’t foresee a strongly secure distribution system.
