AUR updates

General system Pacman
1

I see this morning that there is a AUR updates, but when I run # pacman -Syu nothing comes up like regular updates. Why?

2

Pacman does not work with the AUR.

Just run

yay

to update.

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3

Because pacman is generally for the arch repositories. The AUR is not an arch official repository. For AUR updates EndeavourOS includes the AUR helper package yay. Open a terminal and type yay and hit enter. Follow the prompts to update your AUR packages

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4

I see. Thank you

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5

Thank you

6

At the risk of ‘whatever’, I would suggest installing the package ‘paru’ which is by the yay author I believe, in active development and handles both the AUR and normal updates (ie pacman).

1 Like
7

yay is also in active development and handles both the AUR and the repo packages.

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8

“bauh” is the easiest way I know to upgrade which allows skipping packages.

Sometimes I like to skip kernel point upgrades; have too often updated a mere couple of days after some point upgrades.

Curious if anyone thinks it risky to skip such upgrades.

9

I was under the impression skipping packages was a no no? I guess @dalto could explain.

10

Partial upgrades are definitely risky. Arch-based distros are made to roll forward as a single unit together because they don’t have stable lib versions.

That being said, kernel versions are usually not tied to the rest of the system so as long as you hold back everything related to the kernel, such as kernel modules, it usually won’t be a problem. Of course, if you aren’t using any kernel modules, this won’t be an issue.

Where it can get tricky is if you are using kernel modules that are tied to packages in userspace such as nvidia. Holding that back can make things complicated fast once the related packages start updating.

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11

The yay command is of course the way to go, but some clever people have apparantly managed to edit the pacman.conf to also check for (specific) AUR-packages. So that could be possible.

I use the update-checking-extension from Gnome and have just configured it in a way that it searches for pacman-updates but runs “yay” as command instead of “pacman -Syu”. Usually there are much more pacman-updates than AUR ones on my systems, so when I use yay to upgrade my system almost every day it automatically checks for AUR-upgrades as well (so I don’t have to worry about missing some) while updating the system.

Also tried to configure it to check for AUR+pacman updates instead but felt like too much of a hassle.

12

Do you have a link or reference for this? I am not aware of a way to make pacman check for AUR packages. You can certainly add 3rd party repos to pacman which contain packages from AUR but that is not at all the same thing. Adding 3rd party repos to pacman comes with many dangers.

1 Like
13

Well yes, I think the solution is to create your own local “3rd party repository” and add the AUR-packages you want to have updated there. See here

I should probably note that I don’t know if it works and I personally see no need to use it either.

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14

Yes, you can certainly create local repo with prebuilt AUR packages in it. Unless you are using it to update multiple installs, it seems like an overly complicated solution to me.

Ultimately, aurutils is just a different style of AUR helper.

15

Indeed. It was less of a “you should do that” post, more of an informative “this would also be possible” posting. :wink:

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16

@dbarronos: actually paru is developed by one of the contributors to pacman and yay, main differences are: written in Rust (instead of Go), has file manager mode, shows PKGBUILD by default, and a few other features. Still trying to decide myself which one to use…

17

This is entirely based on the output and very subjective, but paru feels ‘tighter’ to me. Normally I wouldn’t say that w/o going through the code…but I haven’t in this case.

1 Like
18

You can use paru with yay alias :rofl:

19

One of the best things about yay for me that was removed with paru is the combinedupgrade mode which shows you a color-coded display of what changed before you upgrade and lets you opt out of certain updates. This is especially useful for AUR packages where there may be something you might want to defer building until later. It looks like this:

image

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20

I find paru needs a few aliases to function ‘recognisably’ and usefully for me - including reversing the order of display. Haven’t found enough advantages to change over given that (and the number of different places I’d need to ‘set up’ too).